State-space averaging for maternal ECG suppression

In this paper a new method of maternal electrocardiogram suppression for fetal component extraction from one-channel maternal abdominal bioelectric signals is proposed. The method performs maternal ECG estimation by application of state-space averaging. The estimated signal is subtracted from the original one and this way suppressed. The method parameters allow us to balance between the precision of maternal ECG suppression and the necessity not to attenuate the fetal QRS complexes. A small database of the maternal abdominal bioelectric signals is used to investigate the developed system for fetal heart rate determination. The final assessment is based on the detection performance index. It is shown that by proper choice of the parameters we can tune the system so that it is more effective than the classical approach based on template subtraction.