A Fetal Electrocardiogram Signal Extraction Algorithm Based on Fast One-Unit Independent Component Analysis with Reference

Fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) extraction is very important procedure for fetal health assessment. In this article, we propose a fast one-unit independent component analysis with reference (ICA-R) that is suitable to extract the FECG. Most previous ICA-R algorithms only focused on how to optimize the cost function of the ICA-R and payed little attention to the improvement of cost function. They did not fully take advantage of the prior information about the desired signal to improve the ICA-R. In this paper, we first use the kurtosis information of the desired FECG signal to simplify the non-Gaussian measurement function and then construct a new cost function by directly using a nonquadratic function of the extracted signal to measure its non-Gaussianity. The new cost function does not involve the computation of the difference between the function of the Gaussian random vector and that of the extracted signal, which is time consuming. Centering and whitening are also used to preprocess the observed signal to further reduce the computation complexity. While the proposed method has the same error performance as other improved one unit ICA-R methods, it actually has lower computation complexity than those other methods. Simulations are performed separately on artificial and real-world electrocardiogram signals.