Custom FPGA Processing for Real-Time Fetal ECG Extraction and Identification

Monitoring the fetal cardiac activity during pregnancy is of crucial importance for evaluating fetus health. However, there is a lack of automatic and reliable methods for Fetal ECG (FECG) monitoring that can perform this elaboration in real-time. In this paper, we present a hardware architecture, implemented on the Altera Stratix V FPGA, capable of separating the FECG from the maternal ECG and to correctly identify it. We evaluated our system using both synthetic and real tracks acquired from patients beyond the 20th pregnancy week.

Source: Computers in Biology and Medicine - November 16, 2016 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: E. Torti, D. Koliopoulos, M. Matraxia, G. Danese, F Leporati Source Type: research