background: fetal heart rate (fhr) extracted from abdominal electrocardiogram (ecg) is a powerful non-invasive method in appropriately assessing the fetus well-being during pregnancy. despite significant advances in the field of electrocardiography, the analysis of fetal ecg (fecg) signal is considered a challenging issue which is mainly due to low signal to noise ratio (snr) of fecg. objective...

Physicians can obtain fetal heart rate, electrophysiological information, and uterine contraction activity for determining fetal status from an intrauterine catheters electrocardiogram with the maternal electrocardiogram canceled. In addition, the intrauterine catheter would allow physicians to acquire fetal status with one noninvasive to the fetus biosensor as compared to invasive to the fetus...

BACKGROUND Indirect fetal electrocardiography is preferable to direct fetal electrocardiography because of being noninvasive and is applicable also during the end of pregnancy, besides labor. Still, the former is strongly affected by noise so that even R-peak detection (which is essential for fetal heart-rate evaluations and subsequent processing procedures) is challenging. Some fetal studies h...

background: free fetal dna (ffd) in maternal plasma/serum has increasingly become the source of fetal material for diagnostic purposes in recent years. this source of fetal material can be used for sex determination. rh typing paternally inherited sequences and compound heterozygosity. reports on the lack of consistent pcr amplification of y-chromosome sequences of ffd in maternal plasma/serum ...

Fetal cardiac function is increasingly recognized as a marker of disease severity and prognosis in selected fetal conditions. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used in experimental (animal) fetal cardiology but the lack of a noninvasive fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) to trigger image acquisition remains a major limiting factor precluding its application in humans. Fetal medicine speciali...

Noninvasive fetal health monitoring during pregnancy has become increasingly important in order to prevent complications, such as fetal hypoxia and preterm labor. With recent advances in signal processing technology using abdominal electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings, ambulatory fetal monitoring throughout pregnancy is now an important step closer to becoming feasible. The large number of electr...

Commonly used noninvasive fetal monitoring is based on fetal heart rate (FHR) variability analysis of the Doppler ultrasound signal coming from the mechanical activity of the fetal heart. Estimation of periodicity of acquired signals using the autocorrelation technique is very important. The determination of cardiac intervals using the Doppler signal is more difficult than in electrocardiograph...

BACKGROUND Fetal well-being evaluation may be accomplished by monitoring cardiac activity through fetal electrocardiography. Direct fetal electrocardiography (acquired through scalp electrodes) is the gold standard but its invasiveness limits its clinical applicability. Instead, clinical use of indirect fetal electrocardiography (acquired through abdominal electrodes) is limited by its poor sig...

The purpose of the study was to compare the accuracy of a noninvasive fetal heart rate monitor with that of ultrasound, using a fetal scalp electrode as the gold standard, in laboring women of varying body habitus, throughout labor and delivery. Laboring women requiring fetal scalp electrode were monitored simultaneously with the investigational device (noninvasive fetal ECG), ultrasound, and f...

BACKGROUND Complete atrioventricular block in fetuses is known to be mostly associated with autoimmune disease and can be irreversible if no steroids treatment is provided. Conventional methods used in clinical practice for diagnosing fetal arrhythmia are limited since they do not reflect the primary electrophysiological conduction processes that take place in the myocardium. The non-invasive f...