Extracting fetal heart signal from noisy maternal ECG by multivariate singular spectrum analysis

Abstract

Fetal heart rate and its beat-to-beat variability are two important indications about the health and condition of the fetus. The observed maternal electrocardiogram (ECG) sig-nal consists of mother heart signal and fetal heart signal and is often very noisy. In this paper, we propose a mul-tivariate singular spectrum analysis (MSSA) for extracting and separating the mother heart signal, the fetal heart sig-nal and the noise component from the combined ECGs. The proposed method is designed to cope with noisy recordings, which is an important limitation of several approaches pro-posed in the literature. To validate the proposed algorithm some noisy simulated signals are used. The performance of the technique is also examined using real-life signals.