The Extraction of Fetal ECG from Abdominal Recordings Using Sparse Representation of ECG Signals

one of the most prevalent causes for mortality of infants is cardiac failure. Recordings of heart electrical activities by Electrocardiogram (ECG) are a safe method to detect abnormal arrhythmia in time and reduce cardiac failure in newborns. However, the non-invasive extraction of fetal ECG (fECG) from the maternal abdominal is quite challenging, since the fECG signals are often corrupted by some electrical noises from other sources such as: maternal heart activity, uterine contractions, and respiration, in addition to instrumental noises. Among such signals, the maternal heart signal (due to high amplitude) has the most disruptive effect and the fetal brain signal (due to low amplitude) has the least effect on distortion of the fetal heart signal. In this paper, a new method for extracting fECG signals from multichannel abdominal recordings is proposed. The proposed method uses Compressive Sensing (CS)to reduce the computational complexity and fast Independent Component Analysis (fICA) algorithm to estimate the sources. Also, for finding sparse representations of the acquired ECG signals, two dictionaries namely: discrete cosine transformation and discrete wavelet transform are deployed here. The proposed method is then implemented and its performance is tested using the well-known and publicly available database used in 2013 Physionet Challenge. The performance results are compared with that of the best performing existing methods. The results show that the proposed method based on CS and ICA outperforms the existing detection methods with a Mean Minimum Square Error (MMSE) of 171.65, and therefore can be used for non-invasive and reliable extraction fECG from abdominal recordings.