Fetal Magnetocardiographic Source Separation Using the Poles of the Autocorrelation Function

Fetal magnetocardiography (FMCG) have been extensively reported in the literature as a non-invasive, prenatal technique, in which magnetic fields are used to monitor the function of the fetal heart rate. On the other hand, FMCG may be highly noisy, due to the fetal heart dimensions when compared, for example, to the mother’s. In the field of source separation, many works have shown its efficiency of extracting signals even in this condition of low signal-to-noise ration. In this work, we propose an extension of the work of Barros and Cichocki, where they idealized an algorithm to extract a desired source with resonance at a given delay. We model the system as an autoregressive one, and our proposal is based on the calculation of the poles of the autocorrelation function. We show that the method is efficient and much less computationally expensive than the ones proposed in the literature.