Custom FPGA processing for real-time fetal ECG extraction and identification.

Monitoring the fetal cardiac activity during pregnancy is of crucial importance for evaluating fetus health. However, there is a lack of automatic and reliable methods for Fetal ECG (FECG) monitoring that can perform this elaboration in real-time. In this paper, we present a hardware architecture, implemented on the Altera Stratix V FPGA, capable of separating the FECG from the maternal ECG and to correctly identify it. We evaluated our system using both synthetic and real tracks acquired from patients beyond the 20th pregnancy week. This work is part of a project aiming at developing a portable system for FECG continuous real-time monitoring. Its characteristics of reduced power consumption, real-time processing capability and reduced size make it suitable to be embedded in the overall system, that is the first proposed exploiting Blind Source Separation with this technology, to the best of our knowledge.

Flow Rate Profiler: an instrument to measure blood velocity profiles.

In this paper we present Flow Rate Profiler (FRP), an instrument for measuring the blood velocity by means of ultrasound-based techniques. The velocity is directly related to the shear rate, which is in turn proportional to the shear stress, a parameter expressing the pressure exerted by the blood on the vessel walls. The knowledge of this value is important in medicine to establish the state of the vessels, directly related to vascular diseases. FRP provides a non-invasive measure of the blood velocity by exploiting the red corpuscles property of diffusing ultrasound waves: in practice blood velocity is determined by a cross-correlation technique, which analyses the time shift between correlated subsequent echo waves, instead of frequency shift characteristic of the Doppler technique. The acquired data are then processed on a personal computer by means of mathematical techniques based on the evaluation of the correlation function, giving a reconstructed velocity profile and showing a good adherence with experimental data, since the average error is nearly the 10%. The reconstructed profile is displayed to the operator, who can follow the vessel status in real time. A few comparisons between the reconstructed and the experimental profiles are also presented, together with a study on a small set of patients suffering from artery hypertension.