Development of a novel dataset for non-invasive fetal electrocardiography research

The clinical introduction of non-invasive fetal electrocardiography is hampered by several factors, but primarily by the absence of a universally accepted way to extract the fetal signal from the abdominal recordings. Even though the large research interest in this field, the scientific community efforts are slowed down by the lack of open, complete and large datasets composed of abdominal recordings and an adequate gold standard that could be exploited for validation purposes. This paper presents the substantial progress in the field carried on by the Non-Invasive Fetal ECG Analisys (NInFEA) project, aimed at collecting such a dataset, to be freely released on Physionet in the next future. The dataset collection involved voluntary pregnant women (21st to 27th gestational week) and included as reference gold standard the fetal Doppler ultrasound recording.