Electrode Selection for Noninvasive Fetal Electrocardiogram Extraction using Mutual Information Criteria

International audienceBlind source separation (BSS) techniques have revealed to be promising approaches for the noninvasive extraction of fetal cardiac signals from maternal abdominal recordings. From previous studies, it is now believed that a carefully selected array of electrodes well-placed over the abdomen of a pregnant woman contains the required 'information' for BSS, to extract the complete fetal components. Based on this idea, previous works have involved array recording systems and sensor selection strategies based on the Mutual Information (MI) criterion. In this paper the previous works have been extended, by considering the 3-dimensional aspects of the cardiac electrical activity. The proposed method has been tested on simulated and real maternal abdominal recordings. The results show that the new sensor selection strategy together with the MI criterion, can be effectively used to select the channels containing the most 'information' concerning the fetal ECG components from an array of 72 recordings. The method is hence believed to be useful for the selection of the most informative channels in online applications, considering the different fetal positions and movements

Etude et realisation d'un systeme de mesure rapide de champs acoustiques : applications a l'imagerie medicale en tomographie par diffraction

SIGLECNRS T Bordereau / INIST-CNRS - Institut de l'Information Scientifique et TechniqueFRFranc

Sensor array for fetal ECG. part 1 : Simulations.

International audienceA fundamental investigation and development for foetal electrocardiogram (fECG) visualization has been carried out in this paper. fECG monitoring is a technique for obtaining important informations about the condition of the foetus during pregnancy and labour by measuring electrical signals generated by the foetal heart as measured from multi-channel potential recordings on the mother body surface. It is shown, in this paper, that the potential electrical field on the mother abdomen can be reconstructed by means of an electrical heart model. Most previous electrical heart models were static, not beating ones. Our study suggests that the beating heart model would provide more accurate simulations

Sensor array for fetal ECG. part 1 : Simulations.

International audienceA fundamental investigation and development for foetal electrocardiogram (fECG) visualization has been carried out in this paper. fECG monitoring is a technique for obtaining important informations about the condition of the foetus during pregnancy and labour by measuring electrical signals generated by the foetal heart as measured from multi-channel potential recordings on the mother body surface. It is shown, in this paper, that the potential electrical field on the mother abdomen can be reconstructed by means of an electrical heart model. Most previous electrical heart models were static, not beating ones. Our study suggests that the beating heart model would provide more accurate simulations

Sensor array for fetal ECG. part 2 : Sensor selections

International audienceNon invasive foetal electrocardiogram (ECG) extraction involve measurements from electrodes located on different points of the mother's skin. As a result, foetal ECG (fECG) and maternal ECG (mECG) components appear mixed together in the recordings, in addition with some random disturbances, such as mother electromyograms, thermal noise from the electrodes,etc. Fetal contribution however is minor by comparison with these electrical sources and classical signal processing, like filtering, does not allow us to recover the fECG. The task of obtaining the fECG from the rest of non-desired signals, that disturb the cutaneous recordings, can be coped by using blind source separation (BSS) tools. In the following, we propose some conditions on the number and location of the sensors so that the extraction is optimal