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BioMed Central, BioMedical Engineering OnLine, 1(15), 2016

DOI: 10.1186/s12938-015-0118-1

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Fusion of detected multi-channel maternal electrocardiogram (ECG) R-wave peak locations

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Background: Almost all promising non-invasive foetal ECG extraction methods involve accurately determining maternal ECG R-wave peaks. However, it is not easy to robustly detect accurate R-wave peaks of the maternal ECG component in an acquired abdominal ECG since it often has a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), sometimes containing a large foetal ECG component or other noises and interferences. This paper discusses, under the condition of acquiring multi-channel abdominal ECG signals, how to improve the robustness of maternal ECG R-wave peak detection. Methods: On the basis of summarising the current single channel ECG R-wave peak detection methods, the paper proposed a specific fusion algorithm of detected multi-channel maternal ECG R-wave peak locations. The proposed entire algorithm was then tested using two databases; one database, created by us, was composed of 343 groups of 8-channel data collected from 78 pregnant women, and the other one, called the challenge database, was from the Physionet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2013, including 175 groups of 4-channel data. When using these databases, each group of data was classified into two parts, called the training part and the validation test part respectively; the training part was the first 8.192 s of each group of data and the validation test part was the next 8.192 s. Results: To show the results, three evaluation parameters-sensitivity (Se), positive predictive value (PPV) and F1-are used. The validation test results for the database we collected are Se = 99.93 %, PPV = 99.98 %, and F1 = 99.95 %, while the results for the challenge database are Se = 99.91 %, PPV = 99.86 %, and F1 = 99.88 %. Conclusion: The results of the test show that the robustness of our proposed whole fusion algorithm was superior to that of other outstanding algorithms for maternal R-wave detection, and is much better than that of single channel maternal R-wave detection algorithms.