Model-based estimation of aortic and mitral valves opening and closing timings in developing human fetuses

Abstract

Electromechanical coupling of the fetal heart can be evaluated noninvasively using doppler ultrasound (DUS) signal and fetal electrocardiography (fECG). In this study, an efficient model is proposed using K-means clustering and hybrid Support Vector Machine-Hidden Markov Model (SVM-HMM) modeling techniques. Opening and closing of the cardiac valves were detected from peaks in the high frequency component of the DUS signal decomposed by wavelet analysis. It was previously proposed to automatically identify the valve motion by hybrid SVM-HMM[1] based on the amplitude and timing of the peaks. However, in the present study, six patterns were identified for the DUS components which were actually ..