Evaluation of Diagnostic Performance of Machine Learning Algorithms to Classify the Fetal Heart Rate Baseline from Cardiotocograph

Abstract

Cardiotocography (CTG) is the widely used cost-effective, non-invasive technique to monitor the fetal heart and mother’s uterine contraction pressure to assess the wellbeing of the fetus. The most important parameters of fetal heart is the baseline upon which the other parameters viz. acceleration, deceleration and variability depend. Accurate classification of the baseline into either normal, bradycardia or tachycardia is thus important to assess the fetal-health. Since visual estimation has its limitations, the authors use various Machine Learning Algorithms to classify the baseline. 110 CTG traces from CTU-UHB dataset, were divided into three subsets using stratified sampling to ensure that the sample is the accurate depiction of the population. The results were analyzed using various statistical methods and compared with the visual estimation by three obstetricians. FURIA provided greatest accuracy of 98.11%. From the analysis of Bland-Altman Plot FURIA was also found to have best agreement with physicians’ estimation.