A fetal heart rate morphological analysis toolbox for MATLAB

Abstract

The fetal heart rate (FHR) is a screening signal for preventing fetal hypoxia during labor. When experts analyze this signal, they have to position a baseline and then identify decelerations and accelerations. These steps can potentially be automated and made more objective by signal processing analysis. Various methods have been described in the literature but there are no open-source programs for performing these steps. The MATLAB toolbox presented here comprises a standard signal preprocessing function, 12 re-coded literature methods for fetal heart rate analysis, a signal viewer (enabling annotation by an expert) and an evaluation procedure with various criteria.