Computerised analysis of labour fetal heart rate traces II
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Computerised analysis of labour fetal heart rate traces II
IRAS ID
119766
Contact name
Stephen Kennedy
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Oxford
Research summary
During birth, the stress of contractions and descent down the birth canal can reduce a baby’s oxygen supply. Nature has provided most babies with the resilience to cope but some suffer birth asphyxia (suffocation). Severe birth asphyxia may cause convulsions and permanent brain damage or death.
To prevent birth asphyxia, the baby’s heart beat can be electronically recorded in labour in a CTG (cardiotocogram). The complicated patterns are assessed by eye, which is error-prone, inconsistent and unreliable. Even experts disagree with each other or with themselves when reviewing the same trace at different times. Such uncertainty causes ’fail-safe’ decisions and many unneeded Caesarean sections.
Computerised analysis of CTG patterns should resolve these problems, but a reliable system is impossible without a large computer archive of CTGs from which key features can be defined. The CTG research group at the University of Oxford has access to such an archive created and maintained by the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust with full details of labour events and how the baby was at birth. This unique resource of which a pseudoanonymised copy is available to the researchers will be used to study outcomes such as fetal distress (common) and birth asphyxia (rarer) in two datasets. The analysis will be complex because CTGs change as labour advances or with events such as epidural use. However, the unique size of the datasets will make it possible to account for these factors.
The overall aim of this work is using a review of the traces and the study’s results to create a computerised system to recognise impending compromise and alert staff. The research group aim to have completed work on the two datasets by 2017 creating a model which would then be tested on real-time prospective data (prospective testing would be the subject of a new ethics application).REC name
South Central - Oxford A Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
13/SC/0153
Date of REC Opinion
21 May 2013
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion