Extraction of Fetal ECG in a Non-invasive Way and Estimation of Fetal Heart Rate

Fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) extraction in a non-invasive way has a vital role in medical diagnosis during pregnancy. Though there has been significant progress in adult electrocardiography, the analysis of fetal ECG is still in its rudiments. The existing methods for fetal ECG analysis are the invasive ones that cause severe infection to the uterine area being crucial for both mother and prenate yielding the necessity of non-invasive methods. In this paper, a non-invasive method is proposed to extract FECG from maternal abdominal ECG (AECG) which starts with the data collection followed by the pre-processing of the data, maternal QRS detection from the pre-processed data and finally fetal ECG extraction & fetal heart rate (FHR) estimation from the data after maternal QRS is properly removed. This method showed very good accuracy when compared to many previous works as mentioned in the paper.