A Review of Techniques for Foetal Electrocardiogram Extraction

Electrocardiogram (ECG) holds high significance in medical diagnostics. Cardiologists consider it as an enduring tool and thus the improvement of the diagnostic quality the signal for various recognitions in different environments become a challenge. The signal acquisition is susceptible to the interference from physiological as well as environmental sources. Foetal ECG provides vital information to the physicist to assist in taking critical decisions especially during labor time. Since the direct contact over foetus is perilous to its health, foetal ECG acquisition becomes a challenging task. There is a time as well as frequency overlap of the stronger maternal ECG over the weak foetal ECG. Thus windowing and simple filtering does not extract these signals. This has encouraged various researchers to dwell deep into innovating such filtering techniques to make the acquired signal qualify for discrete diagnostics. This work focuses on the various algorithms proposed for the foetal extraction in terms of their capabilities and performances.