TY  - JOUR
AB  - Objective. Perinatal asphyxia poses a significant risk to neonatal health, necessitating accurate fetal heart rate monitoring for effective detection and management. The current gold standard, cardiotocography, has inherent limitations, highlighting the need for alternative approaches. The emerging technology of non-invasive fetal electrocardiography shows promise as a new sensing technology for fetal cardiac activity, offering potential advancements in the detection and management of perinatal asphyxia. Although algorithms for fetal QRS detection have been developed in the past, only a few of them demonstrate accurate performance in the presence of noise and artifacts. Approach. In this work, we propose Power-MF, a new algorithm for fetal QRS detection combining power spectral density and matched filter techniques. We benchmark Power-MF against three open-source algorithms on two recently published datasets (Abdominal and Direct Fetal ECG Database: ADFECG, subsets B1 Pregnancy and B2 Labour; Non-invasive Multimodal Foetal ECG-Doppler Dataset for Antenatal Cardiology Research: NInFEA). Main results. Our results show that Power-MF outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on ADFECG (B1 Pregnancy: 99.5% ± 0.5% F1-score, B2 Labour: 98.0% ± 3.0% F1-score) and on NInFEA in three of six electrode configurations by being more robust against noise. Significance. Through this work, we contribute to improving the accuracy and reliability of fetal cardiac monitoring, an essential step toward early detection of perinatal asphyxia with the long-term goal of reducing costs and making prenatal care more accessible.
AU  - Jaeger, K.M.*
AU  - Nissen, M.*
AU  - Rahm, S.*
AU  - Titzmann, A.*
AU  - Fasching, P.A.*
AU  - Beilner, J.*
AU  - Eskofier, B.M.
AU  - Leutheuser, H.*
C1  - 70979
C2  - 55849
CY  - Temple Circus, Temple Way, Bristol Bs1 6be, England
TI  - Power-MF: Robust fetal QRS detection from non-invasive fetal electrocardiogram recordings.
JO  - Physiol. Meas.
VL  - 45
IS  - 5
PB  - Iop Publishing Ltd
PY  - 2024
SN  - 0967-3334
ER  - 

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Objective: In fetal diagnosis the myriad and diversity of heart rate variability (HRV) indices prevents a comparable routine evaluation of disturbances in fetal development and well-being. The work aims at the extraction of a small set of HRV key indices that could help to establish a universal, overarching tool to screen for any disturbance. Approach: HRV indices were organized in categories of short-term (prefix s) and long-term (prefix 1) amplitude fluctuations (AMP), complexity (COMP), and patterns (PATTERN) and common representatives for each category were extracted. This procedure was done with respect to the diagnostic value in the evaluation of the maturation age throughout the second and complete third trimester of pregnancy as well as to potential differences associated with maternal life-style factors (physical exercise, smoking), nutrient intervention (docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) supplementation), and complications of pregnancy (gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR)). Main results: We found a comprehensive minimal set that includes [lAMP: short term variation (STV), initially introduced in cardiotocography, sAMP: heart rate increase across one interbeat interval of phase rectified averaged signal - acceleration capacity (ACst1),lCOMP: scale 4 multi-scale entropy (MSE4), PATTERN: skewness] for the maturation age prediction, and partly overlapping [lAMP: STV, sAMP: ACst1,sCOMP: Lempel Ziv complexity (LZC)] for the discrimination of the deviations. Significance: The minimal set of category-based HRV representatives allows for a screening of fetal development and well-being. These results are an important step towards a universal and comparable diagnostic tool for the early identification of developmental disturbances.Novelty & SignificanceFetal development and its disturbances have been reported to be associated with a multiplicity of HRV indices. Furthermore, these HRV indices change with maturation. We propose the abstraction of HRV categories defined by short- and long-term fluctuation amplitude, complexity, and pattern indices that cover all relevant aspects of maturational age, behavioral influences and a series of pathological disturbances. The study data are provided by multiple centers. Our approach is an important step towards the goal of a standardized diagnostic tool for early identification of fetal developmental disturbances with respect to the reduction of serious complications in the later life.
AU  - Hoyer, D.*
AU  - Schmidt, A.*
AU  - Gustafson, K.M.*
AU  - Lobmaier, S.M.*
AU  - Lakhno, I.*
AU  - van Leeuwen, P.*
AU  - Cysarz, D.*
AU  - Preissl, H.
AU  - Schneider, U.*
C1  - 56594
C2  - 47107
CY  - Temple Circus, Temple Way, Bristol Bs1 6be, England
TI  - Heart rate variability categories of fluctuation amplitude and complexity: diagnostic markers of fetal development and its disturbances.
JO  - Physiol. Meas.
VL  - 40
IS  - 6
PB  - Iop Publishing Ltd
PY  - 2019
SN  - 0967-3334
ER  - 

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Heart rate variability (HRV) analysis is an established method to characterize the autonomic regulation and is based mostly on 24h Holter recordings. The importance of short-term HRV (less than 30 min) for various applications is growing consistently. Major reasons for this are the suitability for ambulatory care and patient monitoring and the ability to provide an almost immediate test result. So far, there have been only a few studies that provided statistically relevant reference values for short-term HRV. In our study, 5 min short-term HRV indices were determined from 1906 healthy subjects. From these records, linear and nonlinear indices were extracted. To determine general age-related influences, HRV indices were compared from subjects aged 25-49 years with subjects aged 50-74 years. In a second approach, we examined the development of HRV indices by age in terms of age decades (25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64 and 65-74 years). Our results showed significant variations of HRV indices by age in almost all domains. While marked dynamics in terms of parameter change (variability reduction) were observed in the first age decades, in particular the last two age decades showed certain constancy with respect to the HRV indices examined.
AU  - Voss, A.*
AU  - Heitmann, A.*
AU  - Schroeder, R.*
AU  - Peters, A.
AU  - Perz, S.
C1  - 8459
C2  - 30113
SP  - 1289-1311
TI  - Short-term heart rate variability - age dependence in healthy subjects.
JO  - Physiol. Meas.
VL  - 33
IS  - 8
PB  - IOP Pub. Ltd.
PY  - 2012
SN  - 0967-3334
ER  -