Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Mathematically Modeling Fetal Electrocardiograms, Samuel Estes, Kiersten Utsey, Erick Kalobwe

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

Abstract

Some of the most common and fatal birth defects are those related to the heart. In adults, possible heart conditions are often identified through the use of an electrocardiogram (ECG). However, due to the presence of other signals and noise in the recording, fetal eletrocardiography has not yet proven effective in diagnosing these defects. This paper develops a mathematical model of three-dimensional heart vector trajectories, which was used to generate synthetic maternal and fetal ECG signals. The dipole model is a useful simplification in which the electrical activity of the heart is viewed as a single time-varying vector originating …