Publication

Abstract : The use of fetal heart rate (FHR) recordings for assessing fetal wellbeing is an integral component of obstetric care. Recently, non-invasive fetal electrocardiography (NI-FECG) has demonstrated utility for accurately diagnosing fetal arrhythmias via clinician interpretation. In this work, we introduce the use of data-driven entropy profiling to automatically detect fetal arrhythmias in short length FHR recordings obtained via NI-FECG. Using an open access dataset of 11 normal and 11 arrhythmic fetuses, our method (TotalSampEn) achieves excellent classification performance (AUC = 0.98) for detecting fetal arrhythmias in a short time window (i.e. under 10 minutes). We demonstrate that our method outperforms SampEn (AUC = 0.72) and FuzzyEn (AUC = 0.74) based estimates, proving its effectiveness for this task. The rapid detection provided by our approach may enable efficient triage of concerning FHR recordings for clinician review.