TY - JOUR
T1 - Acquisition of fetal magnetocardiograms in an unshielded hospital setting
AU - Brazdeikis, A.
AU - Vázquez-Flores, G. J.
AU - Tan, I. C.
AU - Padhye, N. S.
AU - Verklan, M. T.
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received August 29, 2006. This work was supported by the State of Texas via Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston (TcSUH). A. Brazdeikis, G. J. Vázquez-Flores, and I. C. Tan are with the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston (TcSUH), Houston, TX 77204 USA (e-mail: [email protected]). N. S. Padhye and M. T. Verklan are with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX 77030 USA. Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TASC.2007.897308
PY - 2007/6
Y1 - 2007/6
N2 - The acquisition of fetal magnetocardiographic signals in various noisy environments is studied, and improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of weak biomagnetic signals is investigated for various noise levels and gradiometer implementations. There is a consistent improvement in the SNR as fetal gestation age (GA) increases. The SNR in unshielded environment is shown to be acceptable over a wide range of GA values when using the second-order gradiometers with a field balance CB = 5 × 10-4 and a gradient balance CG1 = 5 × 10-3 or better. It is also shown that the optimal gradiometer baseline length strongly depends on the ambient noise level and the overall gradiometer balance. Shorter (<80 mm) baselines are preferred only when using highly balanced gradiometers in a very high noise environments.
AB - The acquisition of fetal magnetocardiographic signals in various noisy environments is studied, and improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of weak biomagnetic signals is investigated for various noise levels and gradiometer implementations. There is a consistent improvement in the SNR as fetal gestation age (GA) increases. The SNR in unshielded environment is shown to be acceptable over a wide range of GA values when using the second-order gradiometers with a field balance CB = 5 × 10-4 and a gradient balance CG1 = 5 × 10-3 or better. It is also shown that the optimal gradiometer baseline length strongly depends on the ambient noise level and the overall gradiometer balance. Shorter (<80 mm) baselines are preferred only when using highly balanced gradiometers in a very high noise environments.
KW - Biomagnetic modeling
KW - Biomagnetic signal detection
KW - Fetal magnetocardiography
KW - SQUID magnetometers
KW - Unshielded environment
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U2 - 10.1109/TASC.2007.897308
DO - 10.1109/TASC.2007.897308
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:34547420244
SN - 1051-8223
VL - 17
SP - 823
EP - 826
JO - IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity
JF - IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity
IS - 2
ER -