Extracting Fetal Beats

Cardiac arrhythmia occurs when the heart is beating too fast, too slowly, or erratically, affecting 1% of all fetuses, and in up to 10% of those cases the pregnancy may be life threatening. Monitoring the heart activity is therefore crucial and this can be done via an electrocardiogram (ECG). Unfortunately, the recording measures both the heart of the fetus and the mother. In order to analyze the fetal ECG properly, we need to develop algorithms that allow us to extract the fetal ECG from the overall recording.

Martijn Boussé

Lecturer

Maastricht University

Happy Marriages and Kidney Exchanges

In everyday life there are many situations where we face a pairing problem, for instance matching students to colleges. The mathematics for dealing with such problems was introduced in the ‘60s using marriage as an illustrative example. The question, in short, was this: Given a group of men and women, is it possible to pair everyone up with a happy match? When it came to build programs matching living kidney donors to patients waiting for a transplant, answering this question became more than a theoretical exercise. Now such programs are up and running and keep thousands of people alive!

Monica Salvioli (@monica_salvioli)
PostDoc researcher

Maastricht University | TU Delft