ECG Biosensors

The Frasch Lab develops non-invasive fetal ECG monitoring approaches to identify fetuses developing acidemia using heart rate variability (HRV) analysis with FDA-approved transabdominal fetal ECG monitors.

Research Focus

Fetal Monitoring Applications

• Non-invasive identification of fetuses developing acidemia using multidimensional fetal HRV analyses
• Detection of systemic and gut fetal inflammatory response in fetal sheep models
• Identification of chronic stress exposure during pregnancy, Zika virus exposure, and autism spectrum disorder

Theoretical Contributions

We investigate the origins of fetal HRV in the stochastic fluctuations of cardiac sinus node cells’ ion channels as a foundation for understanding the memory of chronic hypoxia in HRV patterns.

The HRV Code

We conceptualize an “HRV code” framework synthesizing findings across species and conditions to develop generalized understanding of heart rate variability beyond fetal applications.

Selected Publications

• Clinical trial: Fetal acidemia detection at the bedside — ClinicalTrials.gov
• Fetal HRV analysis for acidemia detection — Physiological Measurement, 2014
• Sampling rate effects on fetal HRV metrics — Physiological Measurement, 2015
• Monitoring fetal intestinal inflammation using HRV — Pediatric Critical Care Medicine
• Fetal ECG signal processing and analysis — PLoS One
• Neuroinflammation and vagus nerve activity — Journal of Neuroinflammation
• Stochastic properties of fetal heart rate — Frontiers in Physiology
• Fetal-maternal ECG analysis — bioRxiv preprint
• Fetal ECG dataset — Harvard Dataverse
• arXiv preprints: 1708.09526, 2002.04136, 1911.01304, 1812.05259, 1902.09746, 1901.06431, 1808.08306, 2001.08264