A Pragmatic Approach to Fetal Monitoring via Cardiotocography Using Feature Elimination and Hyperparameter Optimization.

Abstract

Cardiotocography (CTG) is used to assess the health of the fetus during birth or antenatally in the third trimester. It concurrently detects the maternal uterine contractions (UC) and fetal heart rate (FHR). Fetal distress, which may require therapeutic intervention, can be diagnosed using baseline FHR and its reaction to uterine contractions. Using CTG, a pragmatic machine learning strategy based on feature reduction and hyperparameter optimization was suggested in this study to classify the various fetal states (Normal, Suspect, Pathological). An application of this strategy can be a decision support tool to manage pregnancies. On a public dataset of 2126 CTG recordings, the model was assessed using various standard CTG dataset specific and relevant classifiers. The classifiers' accuracy was improved by the proposed method. The model accuracy was increased to 97.20% while using Random Forest (best classifier). Practically speaking, the model was able to correctly predict 100% of all pathological cases and 98.8% of all normal cases in the dataset. The proposed model was also implemented on another public CTG dataset having 552 CTG signals, resulting in a 97.34% accuracy. If integrated with telemedicine, this proposed model could also be used for long-distance "stay at home" fetal monitoring in high-risk pregnancies.