Fetal ECG Synthetic Database (FECGSYNDB)

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This dataset and its collection methods are described in

Andreotti F., Behar J., Zaunseder S.,Oster J. and Clifford G D., An Open-Source Framework for Stress-Testing Non-Invasive Foetal ECG Extraction Algorithms. Physiol Meas 5, pp. 627-648, 2016.

When referencing this material, please include the above citation and the standard citation for PhysioNet:

Goldberger AL, Amaral LAN, Glass L, Hausdorff JM, Ivanov PCh, Mark RG, Mietus JE, Moody GB, Peng C-K, Stanley HE. PhysioBank, PhysioToolkit, and PhysioNet: Components of a New Research Resource for Complex Physiologic Signals. Circulation 101(23):e215-e220 [Circulation Electronic Pages; http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/101/23/e215]; 2000 (June 13).
[ sample signals ]

The FECGSYNDB is a large database of simulated adult and non-invasive fetal ECG (NI-FECG) signals, which provides a robust resource that enables reproducible research in the field. The data is generated using the FECGSYN simulator (visit website).

Experiment/Simulation Details

The simulator represents maternal and foetal hearts as punctual dipoles with different magnitudes and spatial positions. This current version obtains foetal–maternal mixtures by treating each abdominal signal component (e.g. foetal/maternal ECG or noise signals) as an individual source, whose signal is propagated onto the observational points (‘electrodes’). Therefore this database is able to provide separate waveform files for each signal source.

The modeled volume conductor, sampled from 34 channels (32 abdominal and 2 maternal ECG reference channels), is shown in Fig. 1 below (taken from Andreotti et al., 2016).

[ volume conductor ]

Figure 1. Side (a) and upper (b) view the of volume conductor. Positions of foetal (small sphere, blue) and maternal (larger sphere, red) hearts shown.

For this database, ten different pregnancies were simulated. For each simulated pregnant subject, seven different physiological events were considered and simulated as described below:

Case Description
Baseline Abdominal mixture (no noise or events)
0 Baseline (no events) + noise
1 Foetal movement + noise
2 MHR /FHR acceleration / decelerations + noise
3 Uterine contraction + noise
4 Ectopic beats (for both foetus and mother) + noise
5 Additional NI-FECG (twin pregnancy) + noise

On top of this, there were five different levels of additive noise and 5 repetitions for each combination of settings.

Overall a total of 10 (simulated pregnants) x 7 (cases) x 5 (SNR levels) x 5 (repetitions) = 1750 synthetic signals were produced, totaling 145.8 hours of multichannel data with 1.1 million fetal peaks. Each simulation had a duration of 5 minutes, and was sampled at 250 Hz with a 16-bit resolution. For more technical details, see section 2.1 of Andreotti et al., 2016.

Files

Each subdirectory subXX/snrYYdb/ includes a set of data for simulated pregnancy XX and SNR level YY.

Inside each subdirectory are numerous files in WFDB format. The files names are in the form

subXX_snrYYdb_lZ_WW_VVVV

where:

XX=simulated pregnancy number [01 to 10].
YY=SNR level [00, 03, 06, 09, 12] dB.
Z=repetition number [1 to 5].
WW=[c0 to c5], or empty for the baseline case, representing the cases shown in the above section.
VVVV=Fetal ECG [fecgN] where N is the fetus number, maternal ECG [mecg], or [noise].

The file extensions are in the standard WFDB MIT format: .hea for header files, and .dat for signal files. As shown in Fig. 1 above, channels 1–32 are the abdominal FECG channels and channels 33-34 are the maternal reference ECG channels. Header files also contain additional model parameters described in table 2 of Andreotti et al. The units are listed as 'nu' for no units since the signals are simulated, though their amplitudes do correspond to the 1–2mV amplitudes of normal MECG signals. Annotation files .qrs give machine generated QRS locations of their respective signals.

Contact

If you have any questions, suggestions or want to know more about FECGSYNDB, do not hesitate to contact us .

Icon  Name                    Last modified      Size  Description
[PARENTDIR] Parent Directory - [DIR] images/ 2016-04-28 11:06 - [DIR] sub01/ 2016-04-29 09:36 - [DIR] sub02/ 2016-04-26 14:00 - [DIR] sub03/ 2016-04-26 14:00 - [DIR] sub04/ 2016-04-26 14:00 - [DIR] sub05/ 2016-04-26 14:00 - [DIR] sub06/ 2016-04-26 14:00 - [DIR] sub07/ 2016-04-26 14:00 - [DIR] sub08/ 2016-04-26 14:00 - [DIR] sub09/ 2016-04-26 14:00 - [DIR] sub10/ 2016-04-26 14:06 - [   ] DOI 2016-05-06 14:56 20 [   ] ANNOTATORS 2016-04-28 10:22 36 list of annotators [   ] MD5SUMS 2016-04-29 09:33 178 [   ] SHA1SUMS 2016-04-29 09:33 210 [   ] SHA256SUMS 2016-04-29 09:33 306 [   ] RECORDS 2016-04-26 19:22 273K list of record names

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Updated Friday, 28 October 2016 at 16:58 EDT

PhysioNet is supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) under NIH grant number 2R01GM104987-09.