Open access intrapartum CTG database

Abstract

BackgroundCardiotocography (CTG) is a monitoring of fetal heart rate and uterine contractions. Since 1960 it is routinely used by obstetricians to assess fetal well-being. Many attempts to introduce methods of automatic signal processing and evaluation have appeared during the last 20 years, however still no significant progress similar to that in the domain of adult heart rate variability, where open access databases are available (e.g. MIT-BIH), is visible. Based on a thorough review of the relevant publications, presented in this paper, the shortcomings of the current state are obvious. A lack of common ground for clinicians and technicians in the field hinders clinically usable progress. Our open access database of digital intrapartum cardiotocographic recordings aims to change that.DescriptionThe intrapartum CTG database consists in total of 552 intrapartum recordings, which were acquired between April 2010 and August 2012 at the obstetrics ward of the University Hospital in Brno, Czech Republic. All recordings were stored in electronic form in the OB TraceVue®;system. The recordings were selected from 9164 intrapartum recordings with clinical as well as technical considerations in mind. All recordings are at most 90 minutes long and start a maximum of 90 minutes before delivery. The time relation of CTG to delivery is known as well as the length of the second stage of labor which does not exceed 30 minutes. The majority of recordings (all but 46 cesarean sections) is – on purpose – from vaginal deliveries. All recordings have available biochemical markers as well as some more general clinical features. Full description of the database and reasoning behind selection of the parameters is presented in the paper.ConclusionA new open-access CTG database is introduced which should give the research community common ground for comparison of results on reasonably large database. We anticipate that after reading the paper, the reader will understand the context of the field from clinical and technical perspectives which will enable him/her to use the database and also understand its limitations.

Recovery of missing samples in fetal heart rate recordings with Gaussian processes

“…Although the MHR can also be easily incorporated, we have not used it because the database for our experiments (described in [14]) does not have it. If a missing FHR sample is located far away (in time) from the observed FHR samples in a recording, such observed samples contain very limited information about that missing sample.…”

Analysis of the foetal heart rate in cardiotocographic recordings through a progressive characterization of decelerations

“…The proposed method has been analysed in FHR signals extracted from the CTU-UHB Intrapartum Cardiotocography Database freely available on the PhysioNet Website [10]. In order to show the advantages of this method, the results will be presented through three representative cases, which were selected from the database by their pH value.…”

Relationship between Deceleration Areas in the Second Stage of Labor and Neonatal Acidemia

“…Clinical data consisted of 552 CTG recordings containing FHR and a UC signals both sampled at 4 Hz and constituting the "CTU-CHB Intrapartum Cardiotocography Database" [11] of Physionet [12] (http://physionet.org/physiobank/database/ctu-uhb-ctgdb). CTG recordings were acquired by the Czech Technical University in Prague and the University Hospital in Brno.…”