Improving local PCA in pseudo phase space for fetal heart rate estimation from single lead abdominal ECG

This paper proposes an improved local principal component analysis (LPCA) in pseudo phase space for fetal heart rate estimation from a single lead abdominal ECG signal. The improved LPCA process can extract both the maternal ECG component and the fetal ECG component in an abdominal signal. The instantaneous fetal heart rate can then be estimated from the extracted fetal ECG waveform. Compared with the classical LPCA procedure and another single lead based fetal heart rate estimation method, our improved LPCA method has shown better robustness and efficiency in fetal heart estimation, testing with synthetic ECG signals and a real fetal ECG database from PhysioBank. For the real fetal ECG validating dataset of six long-duration recordings (obtained between the 22(nd) and 40(th) week of gestation), the average accuracy of the improved LPCA method is 84.1%.