Assessment of fetal development by HRV and chaotic global techniques

Introduction: Fetal heart rate and its variability during the course of gestation have been extensively researched. The overall reduction in heart rate and increase in fetal HRV is associated with fetal growth and the increase in neural integration. The increased complexity of the demands on the cardiovascular system leads to more variation in the temporal course of the heart rate which has been shown to be refl ected in measures of complexity. The aim of this work was to investigate novel complexity measures with respect to their ability to quantify changes over gestational age in individual fetuses consistently and in a stable manner.