Analysis and knowledge extraction of newborn resuscitation activities from annotation files.

Abstract

Deprivation of oxygen in an infant during and after birth leads to birth asphyxia, which is considered one of the leading causes of death in the neonatal period. Adequate resuscitation activities are performed immediately after birth to save the majority of newborns. The primary resuscitation activities include ventilation, stimulation, drying, suction, and chest compression. While resuscitation guidelines exist, little research has been conducted on measured resuscitation episodes. Objective data collected for measuring and registration of the executed resuscitation activities can be used to generate temporal timelines. This paper is primarily aimed to introduce methods for analyzing newborn resuscitation activity timelines, through visualization, aggregation, redundancy and dimensionality reduction. We are using two datasets: 1) from Stavanger University Hospital with 108 resuscitation episodes, and 2) from Haydom Lutheran Hospital with 76 episodes. The resuscitation activity timelines were manually annotated, but in future work we will use the proposed method on automatically generated timelines from video and sensor data. We propose an encoding generator with unique codes for combination of activities. A visualization of aggregated episodes is proposed using sparse nearest neighbor graph, shown to be useful to compare datasets and give insights. Finally, we propose a method consisting of an autoencoder trained for reducing redundancy in encoded resuscitation timeline descriptions, followed by a neighborhood component analysis for dimensionality reduction. Visualization of the resulting features shows very good class separability and potential for clustering the resuscitation files according to the outcome of the newborns as dead, admitted to NICU or normal. This shows great potential for extracting important resuscitation patterns when tested on larger datasets.