title: A multi-dimensional Hidden Markov Model approach to automated identification of fetal cardiac valve motion.
abstract: Fetal cardiac assessment techniques are aimed to identify fetuses at risk of intrauterine compromise or death. Evaluation of the electromechanical coupling as a fundamental part of the fetal heart physiology, provides valuable information about the fetal wellbeing during pregnancy. It is based on the opening and closing time of the cardiac valves and the onset of the QRS complex of the fetal electrocardiogram (fECG). The focus of this paper is on the automated identification of the fetal cardiac valve opening and closing from Doppler Ultrasound signal and fECG as a reference. To this aim a novel combination of Emprical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and multi-dimensional Hidden Markov Models (MD-HMM) was employed which provided beat-to-beat estimation of cardiac valve event timings with improved precision (82.9%) compared to the one dimensional HMM (77.4%) and hybrid HMM-Support Vector Machine (SVM) (79.8%) approaches.
authors.forename: Faezeh
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Marzbanrad
authors.forename: Ahsan H
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Khandoker
authors.forename: Miyuki
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Endo
authors.forename: Yoshitaka
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kimura
authors.forename: Marimuthu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Palaniswami
mesh_terms: D001021:Aortic Valve / Q000502:physiology; D001331:Automation; D004562:Electrocardiography; D005260:Female; D005318:Fetal Heart / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000502:physiology*; D005333:Fetus / Q000502:physiology; D006351:Heart Valves / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008390:Markov Chains; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009038:Motion; D011247:Pregnancy; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014463:Ultrasonography