[hal-01076350] Robust estimation of fetal heart rate from US Doppler signals

In utero Monitoring of fetal wellbeing or suffering is today an open challenge due to the high number of clinical parameters to be considered An automatic monitoring of fetal activity dedicated for quantifying fetal wellbeing becomes necessary For this purpose and in a view to supply an alternative for the Manning test we used an ultrasound multitransducer muligate Doppler system One important issue and first step in our investigation is the accurate estimation of fetal heart rate FHR An estimation of the FHR is obtained by evaluating the autocorrelation function of the Doppler signals for ills and healthiness foetus However this estimator is not enough robust since about 20% of FHR are not detected in comparison to a reference system These non detections are principally due to the fact that the Doppler signal generated by the fetal moving is strongly disturbed by the presence of others several Doppler sources mother' s moving pseudo breathing etc By modifying the existing method autocorrelation method and by proposing new time and frequency estimators used in the audio' s domain we reduce to 5% the probability of non-detection of the fetal heart rate These results are really encouraging and they enable us to plan the use of automatic classification techniques in order to discriminate between healthy and in suffering foetus



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