Sequential separation of twin pregnancy electrocardiograms

Abstract

We propose to tackle the problem of maternal abdominal electric signals decomposition with a combined application of independent component analysis and projective or adaptive filtering. The developed method is employed to process the four-channel abdominal signals recorded during twin pregnancy. These signals are complicated mixtures of the maternal ECG, the ECGs of the fetal twins and noise of various origin. Although the independent component analysis cannot separate the respective signals, the proposed combination of the methods deals with this task successfully. A simulation experiment confirms high efficiency of this approach.