{"doi":"10.1109/tbme.2023.3238736","title":"KUBAI: Sensor Fusion for Non-Invasive Fetal Heart Rate Tracking","abstract":"<italic xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\">Objective:</i> Fetal heart rate (FHR) is critical for perinatal fetal monitoring. However, motions, contractions and other dynamics may substantially degrade the quality of acquired signals, hindering robust tracking of FHR. We aim to demonstrate how use of multiple sensors can help overcome these challenges. <italic xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\">Methods:</i> We develop KUBAI <sup xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\">1</sup> , a novel stochastic sensor fusion algorithm, to improve FHR monitoring accuracy. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we evaluate it on data collected from gold standard large pregnant animal models, using a novel non-invasive fetal pulse oximeter. <italic xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\">Results:</i> The accuracy of the proposed method is evaluated against invasive ground-truth measurements. We obtained below 6 beats-per-minute (BPM) root-mean-square error (RMSE) with KUBAI, on five different datasets. KUBAI's performance is also compared against a single-sensor version of the algorithm to demonstrate the robustness due to sensor fusion. KUBAI's multi-sensor estimates are found to give overall 23.5% to 84% lower RMSE than single-sensor FHR estimates. The mean <inline-formula xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\"><tex-math notation=\"LaTeX\">$\\pm$</tex-math></inline-formula> SD of improvement in RMSE is 11.95 <inline-formula xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\"><tex-math notation=\"LaTeX\">$\\pm$</tex-math></inline-formula> 9.62 BPM across five experiments. Furthermore, KUBAI is shown to have 84% lower RMSE and <inline-formula xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\"><tex-math notation=\"LaTeX\">$\\sim$</tex-math></inline-formula> 3 times higher <inline-formula xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\"><tex-math notation=\"LaTeX\">$R^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula> correlation with reference compared to another multi-sensor FHR tracking method found in literature. <italic xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\">Conclusion:</i> The results support the effectiveness of KUBAI, the proposed sensor fusion algorithm, to non-invasively and accurately estimate fetal heart rate with varying levels of noise in the measurements. <italic xmlns:mml=\"http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\">Significance:</i> The presented method can benefit other multi-sensor measurement setups, which may be challenged by low measurement frequency, low signal-to-noise ratio, or intermittent loss of measured signal.","journal":"IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering","year":2023,"id":369505,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":8,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9472,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":808293,"name":"Kourosh Vali","orcid":"0000-0002-7165-6715","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":808294,"name":"Weitai Qian","orcid":"0000-0001-9615-2460","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":819005,"name":"Mahya Saffarpour","orcid":"0000-0002-6643-259X","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":808297,"name":"Soheil Ghiasi","orcid":"0000-0002-1036-791X","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":808292,"name":"Begum Kasap","orcid":"0000-0001-5894-2883","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":26,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:15:32.670954Z","pmid":"37022063","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}