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Non-Invasive Fetal EEG Extraction from Concentric Circular Electrode Arrays on the Maternal Abdomen—A Feasibility Study: Single, Dual, and Concentric Multi-Electrode Architectures
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Non-Invasive Fetal EEG Extraction from Concentric Circular Electrode Arrays on the Maternal Abdomen—A Feasibility Study: Single, Dual, and Concentric Multi-Electrode Architectures

Ali Nasirlou, Niki Manouchehri, Helen Guez, Robert Clancy, Eilon Shany, Offer Erez and Allon Guez
Applied sciences, v 16(18), 9013
11 Sep 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/app16189013
Featured in Collection :   Research Supported by Drexel Libraries' OA Programs
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https://doi.org/10.3390/app16189013View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open Access Discount via Drexel Libraries Read and Publish Program 2026 Open CC BY V4.0

Abstract

fetal EEG beamforming MVDR electrode array neonatal EEG non-invasive monitoring abdominal recording
Fetal electroencephalogram (fEEG) recording could address the gap of functional fetal brain testing and enable direct assessment of fetal brain status during pregnancy and labor. However, the fetal EEG signal (~1 µV) is masked by roughly 80 dB (about 10,000×) of maternal ECG and other bioelectric interferences. This synthetic-data feasibility study presents whether the fetal EEG can be recovered from the maternal abdomen surface by using the following three sensing architectures on physiologically scaled synthetic data: single electrode, dual electrode, and a concentric 28-electrode array centered over the fetal head. We show that exploiting a known geometric attenuation steering vector with a minimum-variance distortionless-response (MVDR) beamformer raises recovery correlation from ~0 to ~0.28 and improves signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by ~67 dB. A follow-up validation replaces the synthetic EEG generator with actual neonatal EEGs recorded from the scalp, obtained from OpenNeuro ds004577 and the Helsinki Zenodo corpus. Comparable recovery performance across both datasets confirms that the synthetic feasibility conclusion generalizes to real neonatal EEG composition and behavioral characteristics. The primary evaluation is based on waveform-level engineering metrics (correlation, SNR, and RMSE), while exploratory secondary analyses assess aEEG envelopes, band-power trends, and burst detection. These analyses are not intended as clinical validation. Independent per-electrode sensor noise remains the dominant residual limiter under the homogeneous geometric model. The reported r ≈ 0.28 should not be interpreted as expected in vivo performance at all gestational ages: an intact vernix layer can add approximately 35 dB of attenuation and makes the required noise floor substantially more stringent. This analysis adds a five-layer volume-conductor analysis, misalignment, depth and impedance-drift stress tests, recording-level statistics, comparisons with classical extraction families (PCA, ICA, adaptive cancelation, and multichannel Wiener filtering), an interference-alignment sensitivity analysis, and exploratory biomarker-level analyses, which together bound the idealizations of the forward model.

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