Digital cardiotocography: What is the optimal sampling frequency?

Publication date: May 2019Source: Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, Volume 51Author(s): Sofia Romagnoli, Agnese Sbrollini, Luca Burattini, Ilaria Marcantoni, Micaela Morettini, Laura BurattiniAbstractCardiotocography (CTG) is the most popular prenatal diagnostic test for establishing fetal health and consists in simultaneous recording of fetal heart rate (FHR, bpm) and maternal uterine contraction (UC, mmHg) traces. Typically, FHR and UC traces are visually analyzed and interpreted by clinicians. Recently, software applications like CTG Analyzer have been developed to support visual CTG interpretation by making it more objective and independent from clinician’s experience. Automatic CTG analysis requires CTG-traces digitalization and thus assessment of a correct sampling frequency (SF). Thus, this paper aims to investigate dependency of automatic CTG analysis on SF in order to identify optimal SF (OSF) for FHR and UC traces that minimizes computational efforts without jeopardizing CTG interpretation. To this aim, the “CTU-CHB intra-partum CTG database” was considered and visually annotated by an expert gynecologist. FHR and UC traces, originally sampled at 4 Hz, were down sampled at 2 Hz, 1 Hz, 0.4 Hz and 0.2 Hz, and automatically analyzed using CTG Analyzer. Eventually, results obtained through automatic analysis were compared to visual annotations, which were taken as reference. A cumulative statistical index (CSI), ranging from 0.00% to 100.00%, was...
Source: Biomedical Signal Processing and Control - Category: Biomedical Science Source Type: research