A Non-invasive Fetal Electrocardiogram Extraction
Algorithm Based on ICA Neural Network
Yalan Ye, Xun Yao,
School of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Chengdu 610054, China
Email: yalanye@uestc.edu.cn
Abstract—The extraction of fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) from
maternal skin electrode measurements is an open problem in
recent decades. Many researchers proposed blind source
separation (BSS) or Independent Component Analysis (ICA)
based neural network methods to address this problem. However,
by these methods all of the source signals are simultaneously
separated, but in fact only one source signal is the desired FECG
and others are unwanted ones. In contrast, blind source
extraction (BSE) only outputs a single source and is closely
related to BSS, which is obviously a better choice. In this paper,
we propose a non-invasive extraction algorithm based on ICA
neural network that can extract the desired FECG with little
noise as the first extracted signal. The algorithm is very robust to
outliers. The real-data world has shown that the algorithm can
achieve satisfying results.
Keywords-blind source separation (BSS); independent
component analysis (ICA); blind source extraction (BSE); fetal
electrocardiogram (ECG)
I. INTRODUCTION
The non-invasive extraction of fetal electrocardiogram
(FECG) is an interesting and challenging problem in
biomedical engineering. The FECG contains important
information about the health and condition of the fetus.
Unfortunately, the desired FECG recorded at the electrode is
always corrupted by considerable noise, such as the maternal
electrocardiogram (MECG) contributions with extremely high
amplitude, the mother’s respiration, the power line interference,
and the thermal noise due to electronic equipment. Thus
obtaining the FECG [1, 2, 3], [10, 11] is a difficult task.
Many approaches have been reported to get the FECG,
such as singular value decomposition (SVD) [2], multi-
reference adaptive noise cancellation [3], etc. But the results
are not satisfied or highly sensitive to electrode placement.
Recently it was shown in [3] that the problem can be modeled
as blind source separation (BSS) [1], [3, 4, 5], [8, 9, 10]. It was
reported that the results by BSS were more satisfied than that
by classic methods [3]. However, separating all the sources
from a large number of observed sensor signals takes a long
time and is not necessary, so the blind source extraction (BSE)
[4, 5, 6], [11, 12, 13, 15] method, which is closed related to
BSS, is preferred in this paper. Among them, a simple
algorithm developed by Barros and Cichocki [7] provides a
successful extraction of FECG. The algorithm, which only
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1-4244-1120-3/07/$25.00 ©2007 IEEE
Zhi-Lin Zhang, Quanyi Mo
School of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Chengdu 610054, China
Email: xunyao@uestc.edu.cn
needs to estimate the period of the desired source signal in
advance, is simple and run quickly, but it cannot recover a
clean desired signal, that is to say, the FECG extracted by this
algorithm is often mixed with some noise, such as the mother’s
breathing artifact. What is more, it is sensitive to the estimation
error of the period.
The primary objective of this paper is to propose a novel
non-invasive algorithm based on ICA neural network using
maximizing the negentropy cost function, which extracts the
desired and clear FECG as the first output signal with coarse
estimate of its kurtosis, but not the accurate value of its
kurtosis. In addition, it is robust to outliers.
II. PROPOSED ALGORITHM
A. Problem Statement
In BSE, one observes an n-dimensional stochastic signal
vector x that is regarded as the linear transformation of an m-
dimensional mutually independent zero-mean and unit-
variance source vector s, i.e., x=As, where A is an unknown
mixing matrix. The goal of source extraction is to find a vector
w such that y = wTx = wTAs is an estimated source signal up to
a scalar. To cope with ill-conditioned case and to make
algorithms simpler and faster, whitening is often used to
transform the observed signals x to z = Vx such that E{zz T}=
I, where V is a whitening matrix. For convenience, in the
following we assume that x are the whitened observed signals
and n =m.
Besides the independence assumption, we further assume
that we have a priori knowledge about the desired source signal
k4 ( y ) = E{ y 4 }/( E{ y 2 }) 2 − 3, (1)
a and b are give scalars with a ＜ b. Then we propose to
maximize the following objective function [14]:
J ( y ) ≈ [ E{G ( y )} − E{G (v )}]2 , (2)
subject to the constraint a≤k4(y) ≤ b and ‖w‖ =1, where y
= wTx and G(•) can be any non-quadratic function. ν is a
Gaussian variable having zero mean and unit variance. Some
practical functions were suggested for G(•) [13]:
1 (3)
G1 ( y ) = lg cosh(a1 y ),
a1
 1 1 (4) f ( y ( k )) = g ( y (k )), (14)
G2 ( y ) = exp( − a2 y 2 ),
a2 2 ∧
If k 4 ( y ) ≤a then
1 4 (5)
G3 ( y ) = y , ∧
4 (15)
f ( y ( k )) = g ( y (k )) − 2σ [ a − k 4 ( y (k ))]h( y (k )) x(k ),
where 1≤a1 ≤2 and a2 ≈1. G1 is a good general purpose
function; G2 may be better when the independent components ∧
If k 4 ( y ) ≥b then
are highly super-Gaussian, or when robustness is very
important; G3 is better suited for sub-Gaussian signals, ∧

respectively [13]. Since our aim is to obtain the FECG, we f ( y ( k )) = g ( y (k )) + 2σ [k 4 ( y (k )) − b]h( y (k ))x(k ), (16)
choose G2 for G(•) in our proposed algorithm. in which g(y(k)) and h(y(k)) are derived by
g ( y( k )) = E{x(k ) tanh(a1wT x( k ))}, (17)
B. Proposed novel Algorithm ∧ ∧
4 m4 (k ) m2 (k ) 3 (18)
First, to find one independent component, or projection h( y(k )) = [∧ y (k ) − y(k )],
∧3
pursuit direction as y = wTx, we can regard the kurtosis range m2 (k ) m4 (k )
of the desired signal as the constraint condition. With such ∧
conditions applied, the BSE problem becomes a constrained and the following on-line estimations of mp (p=2,4) and k 4 ( y )
optimization problem: are performed, respectively [6]:
maximize J ( y) ≈ [E{G( y )} − E{G(v)}]2 , (6)
∧ ∧
m p (k + 1) = (1 − η ) m p (k ) + η (k ) y p (k ), ( p = 2, 4) (19)
under constraints a ≤ k4 (wT x) ≤ b & w &= 1 ∧
∧ m 4 (k + 1) (20)
Second, using a penalty function method [14] we rewrite k4 ( y (k + 1)) = − 3.
∧2
the constrained objective function (6) as follows: m 2 (k + 1)
There are two important practical issues that should be
F (w, σ ) = [ E{G( y)} − E{G (v)}]2 + σ {[max{0, −(k4 (wT x) − a)}]2 (7) considered in our proposed algorithm. One important issue is
+ [max{0, −(b − k4 (wT x))}]2 }, about robustness. A very attractive property of our proposed
where σis penalty factor. Note here the cost function and the algorithm in this paper is robustness to outliers [13]. This
penalty function of our proposed algorithm is different from means that single, highly erroneous observations do not have
our previous algorithm [12]. much influence on the estimator. In particular, if one chooses a
∧

By differentiation F(w,σ) with respected to w, we have function G(y) that is bounded, and w is rather robust to
outliers. If this is not possible, one should at least choose a
If a≤k4(y) ≤ b then function G(y) that does not grow very fast when | y | grows.
This is the case, for example, when kurtosis is used as a
∂F ( w, σ ) ∂J (w , σ ) (8)
= , contrast function, which is equivalent to using w with G(y) =
∧

∂w ∂w
y4. Therefore, considering for robustness, we choose
If k4(y)≤a then negentropy (2) as the contrast function in this paper instead of
∂F ( w, σ ) ∂J (w , σ ) ∂k ( y ) kurtosis in our previous paper [12].
= − 2σ [ a − k4 ( y )] 4 , (9)
∂w ∂w ∂w The other issue is the choice of a and b. If a and b are not
suitably chosen (i.e. a is too small and/or b is too large), then it
If k4(y)≥b then is possible that several other source signals’ normalized
∂F ( w, σ ) ∂J (w , σ ) ∂k ( y ) (10) kurtosis value also lie in the range [a, b]. There are several
= + 2σ [k 4 ( y ) − b] 4 , methods to solve this problem. A simple one is dividing [a, b]
∂w ∂w ∂w
where into several sub-range [a, c1][c1, c2], … , [cg, b], and running
∂k4 ( y ) 4m4 m2 (11) the algorithm for each sub-range. Another method is to use the
= 3 [ E{xy 3 } − E{xy}]. generalized energy-based deflation procedure [4], [6] to
∂w m2 m4
sequentially extract all these source signals, which is described
m2 and m4 are the second-order moment and the fourth-order
below.
moment of y, respectively. Therefore, applying the standard
gradient ascent approach to (7), we derive the on-line learning Let us suppose that yp has been extracted, where the
rule as following: subscript p indicates the total number of source signals being
∂F (w, σ1 , σ 2 ) extracted so far. Now we use the knowledge of p to generate
w (k + 1) = w(k ) + µ (12) the new observation vector xp+1 which will not include the
∂w
= w (k ) + µ f ( y(k ))x(k ), already extracted signals (y1, … , yp). It has been theoretically
(13) shown in [4], [6] that this task can be done by this linear
w (k + 1) + = w(k + 1) / & w (k + 1) &,
transformation
where k indicates time index and
∧ i y (k ), ( p = 1, 2,")
x p +1 (k ) = x p (k ) − w (21)
If a≤ k 4 ( y ) ≤ b then p p

which minimizes the loss function

807
 m adopted the offline version of our algorithm to make fair
Ji p ( w p +1 2 ∑ p+1, j
i p ) = E{ξ ( x )} = 1 E{ x 2 }
j =1
(22)
comparison as Barros’s algorithm was offline algorithm. In
general, the normalized kurtosis value of FECG lied in the
i range from 4 to 9, so we set a = 4 and b = 9 for our algorithm.
Note that w p is different from wp; the latter is used to The extracted FECGs by two algorithms were shown in Fig.2.
extract the source signal yp is eliminated from the mixture of It was clear to see that the extracted FECG2 by Barros’s
sources. Applying gradient descent to (19) we obtain the algorithm [7] was corrupted by some noise when a peak lay at
learning rule τ*=112 sampling periods was adopted(we believed it was just
i (k + 1) = w
i (k ) +η (k ) y (k )x (k ), ( p = 1, 2,") (23) the true time delay for extraction the FECG.[13]), while the
w p p p p p +1
extracted FECG1 by our algorithm was clearer, implying our
∧
one greatly reduced the mother’s breathing artifact and
where η is a learning rate. Different to the deflation procedure obtained clearer FECG, compared with Barros’s algorithm.
based on Gram-Schmidit-like to orthogonalization [4], this
Furthermore, when we intentionally set the time delayτ*=113
deflation procedure avoids accumulation of error during the
deflation. in Barros’s algorithm(remembered that the true time delay was
τ*=112), the extracted FECG3 of Barros’s algorithm was not
The third issue is that the above on-line (12)-(20) including the FECG at all.
the deflation procedure (21)-(23) can be directly transformed
into an offline algorithm.
10

III. EXPERIMENTS ON REAL-WORLD DATA 5

FECG1
To check the validity and good performance of the 0

-5
proposed algorithms, we have performed extensive computer -10

simulations and experiments on real-world data. But due to 10

500 1000 1500 2000 2500

space limitations, we only present several typical results. 5

In the experiment, we used real-world ECG data to test our FECG2

0

-5

algorithm. The ECG data set used in this experiment was -10

distributed by De Moor [16], which was a famous

500 1000 1500 2000 2500

10

electrocardiogram measured from a pregnant woman (Fig.1). 5

The electrocardiogram measurements were recorded over 10s,

FECG3

and sampled at 250Hz (although in De Moor’s homepage he -5

claimed the sampling frequency is 500Hz, Barros et al. [7] -10

500 1000
Sample Ponits
1500 2000 2500

assured that it was 250Hz). The task was to obtain the fetal
ECG (FECG), which was corrupted by a lot of noise, such as
the maternal electrocardiogram (MECG) with extremely high
amplitude, mother’s respiration, and thermal noise due to the
electronic equipment.
Figure 2. Comparison of the extracted FECGs. FECG1 is extracted by our
proposed algorithm in this paper; FECG2 is extracted by Barros’s algorithm
[7] when estimation time delay is true oneτ*=112); FECG3 is extracted by
Barros’s algorithm [7] when estimation error time delay occur (τ*=113).
(from top to bottom)

50
x1

0
-50
2000 500 1000 1500 2000 2500
Clearly, the estimation errors of the time delay serious
affect the performance of Barros’s algorithm [7], that is to say,
x2

if the errors are introduced in this estimation (sometimes the

-200
1000 500 1000 1500 2000 2500

errors cannot be avoided), the Barros’s algorithm’s

x3

0
-100
500 500 1000 1500 2000 2500
performance degrades. In contrast, our algorithm does not has
x4

0
-50
1000 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 this drawback.
x5

0
-100
10000 500 1000 1500 2000 2500

IV. CONCLUSION
x6

0
-1000
10000 500 1000 1500 2000 2500
Extracting the FECG signal from the composite maternal
x7

0
-1000
10000 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 ECG signal is of great interest. Based on maximizing the
objective function presented in (2), this paper presents a novel
x8

0
-1000
0 500 1000
Sample Ponits
1500 2000 2500
algorithm based on ICA neural network for FECG extraction.
The algorithm can also be considered as a general extraction
Figure 1. ECG data measured from a pregnant woman
algorithm to extract the desired signal with a specific kurtosis
range. Detailed discussion and analysis of the proposed
algorithm will be given in a full separated paper in the near
future.
Our proposed algorithm in this paper and Barros’s
algorithm [7] were carried out to extract the desired FECG. We

808
 ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The work was supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (Grant No. 60673142).
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