Artificial Intelligence-Assistant Cardiotocography: Unified Model for Signal Reconstruction, Fetal Heart Rate Analysis, and Variability Assessment

TL;DR

This paper presents an AI-based model for fetal heart rate monitoring that improves signal reconstruction and analysis, demonstrating high accuracy in detecting critical FHR features and variability.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel AI model tailored for FHR monitoring, utilizing large-scale pre-training and a new categorical judgment method for improved clinical assessment.

Findings

High sensitivity (89.13%) and specificity (87.78%) in detecting FHR decelerations.

High sensitivity (62.5%) and specificity (92.04%) in detecting FHR accelerations.

AUC scores of 0.7214 and 0.9643 for FHR periodicity and amplitude variation verification.

Abstract

The monitoring of fetal heart rate (FHR) and the assessment of its variability are crucial for preventing fetal compromise and adverse outcomes. However, traditional methods encounter limitations arising from equipment performance, data transmission, and subjective assessments by doctors. We have developed a tailored AI-based FHrCTG model specifically for FHR monitoring, which effectively mitigates noise interference and precisely reconstructs signals. Our model was pre-trained on a massive dataset consisting of 558,412 unlabeled data points and further refined using 7,266 expert-reviewed entries. To validate FHR, we introduced the Intersection Overlapping Labels (IOL) approach, which transforms rate analysis into categorical judgments. Testing revealed that our model demonstrates high sensitivity and specificity in detecting critical FHR decelerations (89.13% and 87.78%, respectively) and accelerations (62.5% and 92.04%, respectively). Furthermore, based on Fischer's criteria for clinical application, our model achieved impressive AUC scores of 0.7214 and 0.9643 for verifying FHR periodicity and amplitude variation, respectively.