Denoising of Phonocardiographic Records using Independent Component Analysis

Abstract

Phonocardiography is a tracing technique of heart sounds and the recording of cardiac acoustics vibration by means of microphone transducer. It is a low-cost, passive and fully non-invasive acoustic recording. As in this technique, the acoustic signal needs to be recorded on the maternal abdominal surface is heavily loaded by noise. Determination of the fetal heart rate (FHR) raises serious signal processing issues. The development of an accurate and robust fetal Phonocardiograph (fPCG) has been since long researched. This paper presents a novel approach of denoising the fPCG using independent component analysis (ICA), a computational method for separating a multivariate signal into additive sub-components supposing the mutual statistical independence of the non-Gaussian source signals. It is a special case of blind source separation (BSS). the qualitative evaluation of the denoising performance has shown that the proposed method cancels noises more effectively than the other examined techniques.