Section: New Results

Analysis of heart beat rate variability

Participant : Paulo Gonçalves [correspondant] .

Intrapartum fetal heart rate monitoring constitutes an important stake aiming at early acidosis detection. Measuring heart rate variability is often considered a powerful tool to assess the intrapartum health status of fetus and has has been envisaged using various techniques. In the present contribution, the power of scale invariance parameters, such as the Hurst exponent and the global regular- ity exponent, estimated from wavelet coefficients of intrapartum fetal heart rate time series, to evaluate the health status of fetuses is quantified from a case study database, constituted at a French Academic Hospital in Lyon. Notably, the ability of such parameters to discriminate subjects incorrectly classified according to FIGO rules as abnormal will be discussed. Also, the impact of the occurrence of decelerations identified as complicated by obstetricians on the values taken by Hurst parameter is investigated in detail. (See [7] )