Determination of fetal heart rate from abdominal signals: evaluation of beat-to-beat accuracy in relation to the direct fetal electrocardiogram
-
Janusz Jezewski
,
Adam Matonia
Abstract
The main aim of our work was to assess the reliability of indirect abdominal electrocardiography as an alternative to the commonly used Doppler ultrasound monitoring technique. As a reference method, we used direct fetal electrocardiography. Direct and abdominal signals were acquired simultaneously, using dedicated instrumentation. The developed method of maternal signal suppression as well as fetal QRS complexes detection was presented. Recordings were collected during established labors, each consisted of four signals from the maternal abdomen and the reference signal acquired directly from the fetal head. After assessing the performance of the QRS detector, the accuracy of fetal heart rate measurement was evaluated. Additionally, to reduce the influence of inaccurately detected R-waves, some validation rules were proposed. The obtained results revealed that the indirect method is able to provide an accuracy sufficient for a reliable assessment of fetal heart rate variability. However, the method is very sensitive to recording conditions, influencing the quality of signals. Our investigations confirmed that abdominal electrocardiography, even in its current stage of development, offers an accuracy equal to or higher than an ultrasound method, at the same time providing some additional features.
©2012 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Masthead
- Review
- Diagnosis, prevention and treatment of accidental and perioperative hypothermia
- Research Articles
- Development of a computer-based automated pure tone hearing screening device: a preliminary clinical trial
- Control of a HexaPOD treatment couch for robot-assisted radiotherapy
- Mechanical testing of an absorbable hybrid fusion cage for the cervical spine
- Determination of the frictional coefficient of the implant-antler interface: experimental approach
- Section plane selection influences the results of histomorphometric studies: the example of dental implants
- Decomposition of fractionated local electrograms using an analytic signal model based on sigmoid functions
- Determination of fetal heart rate from abdominal signals: evaluation of beat-to-beat accuracy in relation to the direct fetal electrocardiogram
- Feature selection using binary particle swarm optimization and support vector machines for medical diagnosis
- Interoperability optimization in healthcare collaboration networks
- Three-dimensional image fusion across PET+MRI modalities based on the approach of characteristic coregistration
