Fecgsyngui: A GUI interface to fecgsyn for simulation of maternal-foetal activity mixtures on abdominal electrocardiogram recordings

This paper describes, a graphical user interface (GUI) for synthetic simulation of maternal-foetal ECG mixtures. The GUI is directly linked to the previously introduced fecgsyn ECG model, which was used for producing a subset of data of the Physionet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2013. fecgsyngui serves as a tool that facilitates the use of the broad capabilities of fecgsyn. ECG mixtures can be generated with realistic beat-to-beat variability, morphology, amplitude modulation due to respiration and foetal movement. The GUI allows the user to visualise and generate a set of realistic scenarios to stress test and train separation and detection algorithms. Electrodes can be placed on the maternal abdomen using an interactive geometric representation. Simulation parameters and generated signals can be exported to .mat files for further processing. Using the underlying model, noise sources, ectopic beats, and multiple foetuses can be added. A series of pathological scenarios for situations (described in the original publication) for which data collection is problematic in reality, are included. These can be further customised to mirror specific pathological situations.