This work is an attempt to assess the reliability of indirect abdominal electrocardiography as an alternative technique of fetal monitoring. As a reference signal we used the simultaneously acquired direct fetal electrocardiogram. Each recording consisted of four signals acquired from maternal abdomen and the reference signal acquired directly from fetal head. The first stage of our study conce...

Centralized system for fetal home telemonitoring with wireless data transmission based on GSM service and internet is presented in this paper. Cardiotocographic signals are provided by mobile instrumentation which consists of bioelectrical signal recorder and Tablet PC. It enables to support a classical interpretation of cardiotocographic trace by information on fetal electrocardiogram morpholo...

As part of routine prenatal care, the obstetrician of a 25-year-old gravida 1, para 0 woman performed fetal heart-rate monitoring at 22 weeks gestational age. The fetal heart rate was 90 bpm, below the expected range of 120 –160 bpm. This finding prompted a subsequent fetal ultrasound and echocardiogram. The ultrasound exam showed no evidence of hydrops. Cardiac anatomy was normal, with 4 appro...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the influence of intrapartum epidural analgesia on the occurrence of ST events of the fetal ECG. DESIGN Nested case-control study. SETTING Single-centre academic hospital in the Netherlands. POPULATION Laboring women with a high-risk singleton pregnancy in cephalic position beyond 36 weeks of gestation. METHODS Data of 72 women who received epidural analgesia using...

The discovery of fetal DNA in the plasma of pregnant women has opened up new approaches for noninvasive prenatal diagnosis and monitoring. Up to now, the lack of a fetal DNA marker that can be universally detected in maternal plasma has limited the clinical application of this technology. We hypothesized that epigenetic differences between the placenta and maternal blood cells could be used for...

BACKGROUND The discovery of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma has opened up new possibilities for noninvasive prenatal diagnosis. However, the use of maternal plasma fetal DNA for the direct detection of fetal chromosomal aneuploidies has not been reported. We postulate that the aneuploidy status of a fetus could be revealed by an epigenetic allelic ratio approach, i.e., by analyzing the a...

In this work, we tackle the problem of fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) extraction from a single sensor. The proposed method is based on non-parametric modelling of the ECG signal described thanks to its second order statistics. Each assumed source in the mixture is thus modelled as a second order process thanks to its covariance function. This modelling allows to reconstruct each source by maximi...

The aim of this paper is to model the algorithm for Fetal ECG (FECG) extraction from composite abdominal ECG (AECG) using VHDL (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language) for FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) implementation. Artificial Neural Network that provides efficient and effective ways of separating FECG signal from composite AECG signal has been designed. The p...