Development of a New Non-Invasive System for Fetal Hypoxia Diagnosis

In this study, we have developed a new non-invasive system for fetal hypoxia diagnosis which provides systolic time interval (STI) parameters on the basis of analysis of electrical and mechanical heart activity together. For this we have worked on 1) the proper lead system for the acquisition of abdominal electrocardiogram (ECG), 2) the independent component analysis based signal processing and fetal ECG (FECG) separation, 3) the development of a hardware which consists of an abdominal ECG amplifying module and an ultrasound module and 4) the detection of characteristic points of FECG and Doppler signal and the extraction of diagnostic parameters. The developed system was evaluated by the clinical experiments in which 33 subjects were participated. The acquired STI by the system were distributed within the ranges from the well-established invasive results of other researchers. From this, we can conclude that the developed non-invasive fetal hypoxia diagnosis system is useful. 1