Custom FPGA processing for real-time fetal ECG extraction and identification

Abstract

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. This work is part of a project aiming at developing a portable system for FECG continuous real-time monitoring. Its characteristics of reduced power consumption, real-time processing capability and reduced size make it suitable to be embedded in the overall system, that is the first proposed exploiting Blind Source Separation with this technology, to the best of our knowledge.

Keywords: Biomedical instrumentation; Embedded systems; Fetal ECG; Field programmable gate array (FPGA).