IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine
Computerized analysis of fetal heart rate signals as the predictor of neonatal acidemia
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
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Antepartum fetal monitoring based on the classical cardiotocography (CTG) is a non-invasive and low-price tool for checking fetal status. Its introduction in the clinical routine limited the occurrence of fetal problems leading to a reduction of the precocious child mortality. Nevertheless, very poor indications on fetal pathologies can be inferred from the actual CTG analysis methods, they consist either of the clinician eye inspection or of automatic algorithms. A relevant amount of this unsatisfactory performance resides on the weakness of methods used for classifying fetal conditions and generates a risk alarm during pregnancy. In this paper, three neural classifiers are proposed to discriminate among fetal behavioral states and among normal and pathological fetal conditions, based on CTG recordings. All classifiers are fed by indexes extracted from Fetal Heart Rate signal (FHR). Results show very promising performance towards the prediction of fetal outcomes on the set of collected FHR signals.