Compression of Different Time Series Representations in Asphyxia Detection

Abstract

Physiological signals offer a vast amount of information about the well-being of the human system. Understanding the behavior and complexity of these signs is important for accurate assessments and diagnoses. This study focuses on fetal heart rate (FHR) analysis and its potential to detect perinatal asphyxia by analyzing how different representations of the FHR series could aid in asphyxia detection. Additionally, different compression schemes were applied to evaluate the potential of compression as a measure of complexity. For this purpose, text files containing data of the last hour of the FHR before birth were converted into different types of images (Time Series, Time Series with fixed axes, Recurrence Plot and Poincaré Plot). We then applied compression schemes for text (BZIP2 and GZIP) and images (Lempel-Ziv-Welch, DEFLATE, and JPG) in 5, 10, and 30-minute windows. Correlation analysis revealed that similar compressed formats, such as BZIP2/GZIP and TIFF LZW/TIFF DEFLATE/JPG LOSSY/JPG LOSSLESS, showed the highest values and the correlation between uncompressed and compressed formats became increasingly more negative for larger time windows. Mann-Whitney test between groups (with and without asphyxia) revealed that compressed patterned images, such as Recurrence Plots, showed the highest potential in detecting asphyxia. Moreover, we confirm that larger time windows allow for better detection, due to the presence of more detailed patterns. These findings confirmed the potential of time series image representation in detecting fetal conditions, as well as show that the compression of images leads to better results than the compression of text files.