Abstract
BackgroundCardiotocography (CTG) is the most widely used tool for fetal surveillance. The visual analysis of fetal heart rate (FHR) traces largely depends on the expertise and experience of the clinician involved. Several approaches have been proposed for the effective interpretation of FHR. In this paper, a new approach for FHR feature extraction based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is proposed, which was used along with support vector machine (SVM) for the classification of FHR recordings as 'normal' or 'at risk'.MethodsThe FHR were recorded from 15 subjects at a sampling rate of 4 Hz and a dataset consisting of 90 randomly selected records of 20 minutes duration was formed from these. All records were labelled as 'normal' or 'at risk' by two experienced obstetricians. A training set was formed by 60 records, the remaining 30 left as the testing set. The standard deviations of the EMD components are input as features to a support vector machine (SVM) to classify FHR samples.ResultsFor the training set, a five-fold cross validation test resulted in an accuracy of 86% whereas the overall geometric mean of sensitivity and specificity was 94.8%. The Kappa value for the training set was .923. Application of the proposed method to the testing set (30 records) resulted in a geometric mean of 81.5%. The Kappa value for the testing set was .684.ConclusionsBased on the overall performance of the system it can be stated that the proposed methodology is a promising new approach for the feature extraction and classification of FHR signals.
Highlights
Cardiotocography (CTG) is the most widely used tool for fetal surveillance
The analysis of fetal heart rate (FHR) signal used in monitoring the fetal well being is a powerful tool in establishing the development of the nervous system of the fetus during the last period of pregnancy, starting from the 25th week of gestation [4]
In an effort to achieve this goal we propose an innovative approach in this paper for FHR classification combining empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and support vector machine (SVM) techniques
Summary
The visual analysis of fetal heart rate (FHR) traces largely depends on the expertise and experience of the clinician involved. Cardiotocograph (CTG) is a graphical representation of fetal heart rate (FHR) and uterine activity (UA), termed as electronic fetal monitoring, and has been an indispensable part of antepartum and intrapartum fetal surveillance [1] for four decades. The analysis of FHR signal used in monitoring the fetal well being is a powerful tool in establishing the development of the nervous system of the fetus during the last period of pregnancy, starting from the 25th week of gestation [4]. The current clinical practice of visual interpretation of CTG shows a high degree of inter-observer and intra-observer variability [5] due to its large dependency on the expertise and experience of the clinician(s) involved [6]. It is important to mention that the interpretation phase requires a contextual analysis of all the physiological, pathological and clinical aspects needed in assessing the well being of the fetus
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