HMM-based Supervised Machine Learning Framework for the Detection of fECG R-R Peak Locations

Abstract Objective Fetal Electro Cardiogram (fECG) provides critical information on the wellbeing of a foetus heart in its developing stages in the mother's womb. The objective of this work is to extract fECG which is buried in a composite signal consisting of itself, maternal ECG (mECG) and noises contributed from various unavoidable sources. In the past, the challenge of extracting fECG from the composite signal was dealt with by Stochastic Weiner filter, model-based Kalman filter and other adaptive filtering techniques. Blind Source Separation (BSS) based Independent Component Analysis (ICA) has shown an edge over the adaptive filtering techniques as the former does not require a reference signal. Recently, data-driven machine learning techniques e.g., adaptive neural networks, adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system, support vector machine (SVM) are also applied. Method This work pursues hidden Markov model (HMM)-based supervised machine learning frame-work for the determination of the location of fECG QRS complex from the composite abdominal signal. HMM is used to model the underlying hidden states of the observable time series of the extracted and separated fECG data with its QRS peak location as one of the hidden states. The state transition probabilities are estimated in the training phase using the annotated data sets. Afterwards, using the estimated HMM networks, fQRS locations are detected in the testing phase. To evaluate the proposed technique, the accuracy of the correct detection of QRS complex with respect to the correct annotation of QRS complex location is considered and quantified by the sensitivity, probability of false alarm, and accuracy. Results The best results that have been achieved using the proposed method are: accuracy – 97.1%, correct detection rate (translated to sensitivity) – 100%, and false alarm rate – 2.89%. Conclusion Two primary challenges in these methods are finding the right reference threshold for the normalization of the extracted fECG signal during the initial trials and limitation of discrete frame work of HMM signal (converted from continuous time) which only offers a countable number of levels in observations. By feeding the posterior probabilities, obtained from SVM, into HMM, as emission probabilities, can further improve the accuracy of fQRS location detection.