Iranian Journal of Biomedical Engineering (IJBME)
نشریه علمی مهندسی پزشکی زیستی

Estimation of Fetal Heart Rate from Single-Channel Abdominal Electrocardiogram based on Non-Negative Matrix Factorization

Document Type : Full Research Paper

Authors

Amirreza Asadi 1
Aboozar Ghaffari 2

1 Ph.D. Student, Biomedical Engineering Department, Electrical Engineering Faculty, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

2 Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering Department, Electrical Engineering Faculty, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22041/ijbme.2023.1998804.1836
Abstract
One of the procedures for estimating fetal heart rate (FHR) is the use of an electrocardiogram (ECG). The ECG is a safe, inexpensive, and convenient method that can be used for remote monitoring, so maternal abdominal ECG recording (AECG) is used. The AECG signal, in addition to the fetal ECG (FECG), includes the maternal ECG (MECG), maternal or fetal muscle activity, fetal brain activity, and noise, making it difficult to estimate the fetal heart rate based on the abdominal signal. In this study, the fetal heart rate is estimated from the single-channel AECG signal utilizing non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). In this method, the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is used to obtain time-frequency information of the abdominal signal. Next, the NMF utilizes the STFT matrix as input. The rows of the non-negative matrix resulting from the NMF contain the content of maternal, fetal, and noise, which are used to detect R-peak and FHR. It performs well when MECG and FECG amplitudes are close together, which is one of the advantages of this method. The robustness and performance of the proposed algorithm have been compared with other state-of-the-art single-channel approaches, including deep learning models, on two databases, ADFECGDB and PCDB. Statistical analysis demonstrates that the proposed method is capable of estimating FHR and R-peak accurately. As a result, the proposed method is suitable for long-term fetal monitoring.

Keywords

Maternal Abdominal ECG
Fetal Monitoring
Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT)
Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF)
Fetal R-Peak
Fetal Heart Rate (FHR)
Subjects
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Iranian Journal of Biomedical Engineering (IJBME)
Volume 16, Issue 4
Winter 2023
Pages 345-357

  • Receive Date 20 March 2023
  • Revise Date 19 June 2023
  • Accept Date 19 July 2023

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