Copyright © 2012 Truong Quang Dang Khoa et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Fetal heart rate extraction from the abdominal ECG is of great importance due to the information that carries in assessing appropriately the fetus well-being during pregnancy. In this paper, we describe a method to suppress the maternal signal and noise contamination to discover the fetal signal in a single-lead fetal ECG recordings. We use a locally linear phase space projection technique which has been used for noise reduction in deterministically chaotic signals. Henceforth, this method is capable of extracting fetal signal even when noise and fetal component are of comparable amplitude. The result is much better if the noise is much smaller (P wave and T wave can be discovered).