Dr. Clifford - Towards Noninvasive Fetal Electrocardiography
Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn fimmtudaginn 18. mars kl. 16 í húsnæði Háskólans í Reykjavík í Nauthólsvík í stofu M1.08 (Fönix 2).
Gari D. Clifford, PhD
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
Invasive fetal electrocardiography has been around for over 50 years, yet the practice is confined to laboring mothers and single fetuses. Noninvasive fetal monitoring, where the fetal ECG is recorded from the mother's abdomen, presents the difficult problem of removing the dominant maternal and noise components from the much smaller fetal ECG. Although routine noninvasive monitoring of fetal cardiac activity is now a reality, existing systems report only fetal heart rate, which is of limited use. The challenge has been the development of a method which copes with the nonstationary mixing of the components. Until recently, no method has demonstrated that the fetal ECG can be reliably and routinely disentangled from other signals without significant clinical distortion of the fetal ECG. We present a real-time approach based upon patient-specific modeling, nonstationary tracking and pseudo-periodic component analysis which is able to reliably extract fetal beat morphologies for clinical analysis. Results on 27 laboring mothers demonstrate that we can extract QRS fiducial points and ST segment levels without introducing clinically significant changes in the extracted fetal ECG, compared to a reference fetal scalp electrode. These results indicate that we will be able to reliably detect fetal ischemia, hypoxia and perhaps infection without the need for an invasive probe. Therefore, accurate morphological analysis of the fetal ECG will be possible much earlier than during labor.
