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An Online Subspace Denoising Algorithm for Maternal ECG Removal from Fetal ECG Signals

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Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Noninvasive extraction of the fetal electrocardiogram (fECG) from multichannel maternal abdomen recordings is an emerging technology used for fetal cardiac monitoring and diagnosis. The strongest interference for the fECG is the maternal ECG (mECG), which is not always removed through conventional methods, including blind source separation, especially for low-rank abdominal recordings. In this work, we address the problem of maternal cardiac signal removal and introduce an online subspace denoising procedure customized for mECG cancellation. The proposed method is a general online denoising framework, which can be used for the extraction of a signal subspace from noisy multichannel observations in low signal-to-noise ratios, using suitable prior information of the signal and/or noise. The method is fairly generic and may also be useful for the separation of other signals and noises. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated on both real and synthetic data and benchmarked versus state-of-the-art methods.

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Fig. 1

Adapted from Sameni et al. (2010a)

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Notes

  1. Note that for mixtures of signals with different origins and temporal characteristics, the projection (and back-projection) algorithms and the denoising scheme can generally be customized for each iterations, which is beyond the scope of the current study.

  2. For other applications, one might prefer a finite impulse response (FIR) form, in which the samples do not have any effect beyond a finite window length.

  3. According to our empirical results, for ECG signals, the update should be done over long temporal windows (tens of seconds and above) rather than short windows; otherwise the performance degrades.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran

    Marzieh Fatemi & Reza Sameni

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  1. Marzieh Fatemi
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  2. Reza Sameni
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Correspondence to Reza Sameni.

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Fatemi, M., Sameni, R. An Online Subspace Denoising Algorithm for Maternal ECG Removal from Fetal ECG Signals. Iran J Sci Technol Trans Electr Eng 41, 65–79 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40998-017-0018-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40998-017-0018-4

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