An Effective Integrated Framework for Fetal QRS Complex Detection Based on Abdominal ECG Signal

Purpose Non-invasive fetal electrocardiography (fECG) has a promising application prospect in offering crucial information for assessing early diagnosis and intervention of fetal distress and morbidity during pregnancy. Nevertheless, the detection and extraction of fetal ECG signals are still challenging since fetal ECG signals are exceedingly weak, and liability is affected by maternal ECG and other noises. Methods In this study, a comprehensive framework is developed for fECG signal extraction and fetal QRS complex location. A negative entropy-based blind source separation (BSS) method combined with a template subtraction (TS) method is exploited to obtain fECG signals from abdominal ECG (aECG) recordings. It effectively combines the arithmetic characteristics of fixed-point iteration and the effectiveness of template filtering, making the algorithm simple and fast to obtain clearer fetal ECG signals. Additionally, the combination of filter transformation and adaptive threshold algorithm is adopted for fetal QRS wave location. The filtering operation makes the fECG signal into single peaks. The design of low threshold and high threshold ensures that R waves can be located and detected more accurately. Results The performance results in terms of diagnostic sensitivity (Se), positive predictive value (PPV), accuracy (ACC), and harmonic mean (F1) scores are 96.12%, 96.20%, 92.60%, and 95.94% for the PCDB database, respectively, and 99.78%, 99.10%, 98.88%, and 99.44% for the ADFECGDB database. In addition, the results in terms of Se, PPV, ACC, and F1 scores are 99.46%, 97.89%, 97.37%, and 98.67% for the AECGDB database, respectively. Conclusion This study demonstrates that the proposed framework exhibits superior performance, which can improve the accuracy of fetal QRS complex detection.