Fetal QRS detection and heart rate estimation: a wavelet-based approach

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2014

Authors

Almeida, R (Author) FCUP; Hernani Goncalves (Author) Other; Joao Bernardes (Author) Other; Ana Paula Rocha (Author) FCUP

Journal

Title: Physiological Measurement

Vol. 35

Pages: 1723-1735

ISSN: 0967-3334

Publisher: Institute of Physics Publishing

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 29 Citations

Scopus - 36 Citations

Scientific classification

FOS: Engineering and technology > Environmental biotechnology

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-009-RX2

DOI: 10.1088/0967-3334/35/8/1723

Abstract (EN): Fetal heart rate monitoring is used for pregnancy surveillance in obstetric units all over the world but in spite of recent advances in analysis methods, there are still inherent technical limitations that bound its contribution to the improvement of perinatal indicators. In this work, a previously published wavelet transform based QRS detector, validated over standard electrocardiogram (ECG) databases, is adapted to fetal QRS detection over abdominal fetal ECG. Maternal ECG waves were first located using the original detector and afterwards a version with parameters adapted for fetal physiology was applied to detect fetal QRS, excluding signal singularities associated with maternal heartbeats. Single lead (SL) based marks were combined in a single annotator with post processing rules (SLR) from which fetal RR and fetal heart rate (FHR) measures can be computed. Data from PhysioNet with reference fetal QRS locations was considered for validation, with SLR outperforming SL including ICA based detections. The error in estimated FHR using SLR was lower than 20 bpm for more than 80% of the processed files. The median error in 1 min based FHR estimation was 0.13 bpm, with a correlation between reference and estimated FHR of 0.48, which increased to 0.73 when considering only records for which estimated FHR > 110 bpm. This allows us to conclude that the proposed methodology is able to provide a clinically useful estimation of the FHR.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 13