Assessment of neonatal heart rate immediately after birth using digital stethoscope, handheld ultrasound and electrocardiography: an observational cohort study

Abstract

The extent and initiation of cardiopulmonary resuscitation of neonates in the delivery room are largely guided by neonatal heart rate (HR), with current guidelines recommending the use of ECG for HR monitoring during resuscitation.1–3 Our aim was to determine if handheld ultrasound (HUS) or digital stethoscope (DS) could offer a novel method of quickly and effectively assessing HR in the delivery suite. Two physicians attended each delivery, one assessed the HR by stethoscope auscultation and the second assessed the HR using either HUS (Mortara, Signos RT Personal Ultrasound), DS (Littmann 3200, 3M, USA) or ECG (IntelliVue MP5, Philips, The Netherlands). The time to achieve first HR and the HR recorded were noted, then when both modalities were recording a simultaneous …