Computerized fetal cardiotocography analysis in early preterm fetal growth restriction – a quantitative comparison of two applications
-
Hans Wolf
,
Claartje Bruin
Abstract
Background
We developed an open-source software for the computerized analysis of antenatal fetal cardiotocography (CTG) without limitation of duration of the registration, enabling batch processing and adaptation to any digital storage system.
Methods
STVcalc was developed based on literature about the FetalCare system (Huntleigh Healthcare Ltd, Cardiff, UK). For comparison with FetalCare, we selected the CTGs of all women who delivered in 2011 a small-for-gestational-age (SGA) fetus between 24 and 31 weeks by cesarean section (CS) for fetal distress, or had fetal death, before labor onset.
Results
In 471 CTGs from 39 women, the agreement was 99% for a short-term variation (STV) cut-off of 2.6 ms below 29 weeks and 3.0 ms thereafter, and 95% for 3.5 and 4.0 ms, respectively. In 18 (4%) cases, the proportional difference in STV between FetalCare and STVcalc was more than 10%.
Conclusion
As only slight differences were observed between the proposed feature-rich application and the FetalCare system, it can be considered valuable for clinical practice and research purposes.
Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission. The authors do not have a conflict of interests nor a financial dependency or relationship with this project. The software that was designed for this project is published as freeware (GitHub).
Research funding: None declared.
Employment or leadership: None declared.
Honorarium: None declared.
Competing interests: The funding organization(s) played no role in the study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the report for publication.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/jpm-2018-0412).
©2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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