Automated Detection of Fetal Movements Based on Baseline Calculation and Fetal Heart Rate Accelerations

Fetal electronic monitoring is extensive and important in obstetrics. Although fetal movement is ususally used as an important indicator for quantifying fetal wellbeing, non-invasive and long-term monitoring of fetal movement remains challenging. The object of this study is to develop an algorithm for automatic detection of the fetal movements based on the analysis of Doppler ultrasound signals. In order to detect fetal movements automatically, a two-step process was proposed to track fetal movement. In Step 1, to suppress the problem of error detection, we calculated the baseline of the fetal movement signals from actography to extract new signals. In step2, we recalculated the threshold value of fetal movement detection by utilizing the information of fetal heart rate (FHR) acceleration to produced adaptive threshold values. The results showed that the union of results detected by the proposed method from actography and tocography achieved an encouraging performance with highest sensitivity and acceptable positive predictive value (PPV).