Fetal heart rate (FHR) baseline estimation is of significance for the computerized analysis of fetal heart rate and the assessment of fetal state. In our work, a fetal heart rate baseline correction algorithm was presented to make the existing baseline more accurate and fit to the tracings. Firstly, the deviation of the existing FHR baseline was found and corrected. And then a new baseline was obtained finally after treatment with some smoothing methods. To assess the performance of FHR baseline correction algorithm, a new FHR baseline estimation algorithm that combined baseline estimation algorithm and the baseline correction algorithm was compared with two existing FHR baseline estimation algorithms. The results showed that the new FHR baseline estimation algorithm did well in both accuracy and efficiency. And the results also proved the effectiveness of the FHR baseline correction algorithm.
Cardiotocography (CTG) is a commonly used technique of electronic fetal monitoring (EFM) for evaluating fetal well-being, which has the disadvantage of lower diagnostic rate caused by subjective factors. To reduce the rate of misdiagnosis and assist obstetricians in making accurate medical decisions, this paper proposed an intelligent assessment approach for analyzing fetal state based on fetal heart rate (FHR) signals. First, the FHR signals from the public database of the Czech Technical University-University Hospital in Brno (CTU-UHB) was preprocessed, and the comprehensive features were extracted. Then the optimal feature subset based on the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) genetic algorithm (GA) was selected. At last the classification using least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) was executed. The experimental results showed that the classification of fetal state achieved better performance using the proposed method in this paper: the accuracy is 91%, sensitivity is 89%, specificity is 94%, quality index is 92%, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve is 92%, which can assist clinicians in assessing fetal state effectively.
The ultrasound Doppler fetal heart rate measurement is the gold standard of fetal heart rate counting. However, the existing fetal heart rate extraction algorithms are not designed specifically to suppress the high maternal interference during the second stage of labor, and false detection occurrences are common during labor. With this background, a method combining time-frequency frame template library optimal selecting and non-linear template matching is proposed. The method contributes a template library, and the optimal template can be selected to match the signal frame. After the short-time Fourier transform of the signal, the difference between the signal and the template is optimized by leaky rectified linear unit (LReLU) function frame by frame. The heart rate was calculated from the peak of the matching curve and the heart rate was calculated. By comparing the proposed method with the autocorrelation method, the results show that the detection accuracy of the proposed method is improved by 20% on average, and the non-linear template matching of 23% samples is at least 50% higher than the autocorrelation method. This paper designs the algorithm by analyzing the characteristics of the interference and signal mixing. We hope that this paper will provide a new idea for fetal heart rate extraction which not only focuses on the original signal.