Passive fetal monitoring by adaptive wavelet denoising method

Fetal Heart Rate (FHR) monitoring is one of the most important fetal well being tests. Existing FHR monitoring methods are based on Doppler ultrasound technique, which has several disadvantages. Passive fetal monitoring by phonocardiography is an appropriate alternative; however, its implementation is a challenging task due to low energy of fetal heart sounds and multiple interference signals presence. In this paper, an advanced signal processing method for passive fetal monitoring based on adaptive wavelet denoising is presented. The method's performance is compared with Doppler ultrasound monitor. The results show 94-97.5% accuracy, including highly disturbed cases. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.