Power spectrum analysis of abdominal maternal ECGs enables quantitative evaluation of fetal heart rate variability.
May enable noninvasive fetal HRV quantification from maternal ECG; leaves open prospective validation before clinical use.
A signal analysis procedure is described for obtaining the power spectrum of the fetal and maternal heart rates as recorded from the abdomen. This technique, which includes the subtraction of an averaged maternal ECG waveform using a cross-correlation function and the fast Fourier transform algorithm, enables the detection of all the fetal QRS complexes in spite of their coincidence with the maternal ECGs. The power spectrum of the fetal heart rates (FHR) obtained from 15 women at 32-41 weeks gestation were studied and two indices were measured which are related to the long term and short term variabilities in the FHR signal. It was found that quantitative evaluation of the FHR variability can be obtained using power spectrum analysis.
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Abboud et al. (1990) studied this question.
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