A Preliminary Exploration of the Placental Position Influence on Uterine Electromyography Using Fractional Modelling

Abstract

The uterine electromyogram, also called electrohysterogram (EHG), is the electrical signal generated by uterine contractile activity. The EHG has been considered an expanding technique for pregnancy monitoring and preterm risk evaluation. Data were collected on the abdominal surface. It has been speculated the effect of the placenta location on the characteristics of the EHG. In this work, a preliminary exploration method is proposed using the average spectra of Alvarez waves contractions of subjects with anterior and non-anterior placental position as a basis for the triple-dispersion Cole model that provides a best fit for these two cases. This leads to the uterine impedance estimation for these two study cases. Non-linear least square fitting (NLSF) was applied for this modelling process, which produces electric circuit fractional models’ representations. A triple-dispersion Cole-impedance model was used to obtain the uterine impedance curve in a frequency band between 0.1 and 1 Hz. A proposal for the interpretation relating the model parameters and the placental influence on the myometrial contractile action is provided. This is the first report regarding in silico estimation of the uterine impedance for cases involving anterior or non-anterior placental positions.

Prediction of Preterm Labor from the Electrohysterogram Signals Based on Different Gestational Weeks

“…It consists of EHG signals recorded from 300 subjects, of which 262 delivered to term [17]. The efficiency of an EHG signal analysis for the prediction of preterm labor has been widely evidenced in the literature using this database [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. In general, the feature extraction strategies for the EHG signal analysis can be classified into three groups: linear, nonlinear, and propagated EHG signal-related features [32].…”