Analysis of Systematic Inter-channel Time Offsets in FECG from Maternal Abdominal Sensing

The recently presented spatio-temporal filtering (STF) approach aiming to enhance fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) signals from abdominal sensing is based on an optimized weighted sum of QRS complexes. As the objective function to be maximized is created on the basis of the quality of the synchronization among abdominal channels, the performance of STF can be degraded in presence of uncompensated deterministic time offsets. The paper investigates possible systematic inter-channel time offsets in publicly available FECG signals, as the first step for the introduction of a pre-processing block in the STF implementation aimed at evaluating and compensating such offset.