The use of continuous intrapartum electronic fetal heart rate monitoring (EFM) using a cardiotocograph (CTG) was developed to enable obstetricians and midwives to analyse the changes of fetal heart rate during labour so as to institute timely intervention to avoid intrapartum hypoxic-ischaemic injury. Although CTG was initially developed as a screening tool to predict fetal hypoxia, its positiv...

Isolated cardiac muscle techniques and studies of the chronically instrumented fetal lamb heart were employed to evaluate the ability of fetal myocardium to exhibit poststimulation potentiation. Isometric tension development and the response to paired electrical stimulation were significantly reduced in isolated fetal ventricular myocardium when compared to the adult (P less than 0.001). As in ...

In 2011, 1 in 3 women who gave birth in the United States did so by cesarean delivery. Cesarean birth can be lifesaving for the fetus, the mother, or both in certain cases. However, the rapid increase in cesarean birth rates from 1996 through 2011 without clear evidence of concomitant decreases in maternal or neonatal morbidity or mortality raises significant concern that cesarean delivery is o...

abstract background: a major problem of the first moments of childbirth, especially in “prolonged labor,” is perinatal asphyxia which necessitates neonatal resuscitation. this study aimed at evaluating the alert line of the partogram in recognizing the need for neonatal resuscitation 20–30 s after delivery. materials and methods: 140 full‑term pregnant women were kept under surveillance through...

Interpretation and analysis of intrapartum fetal heart rate, enabling early detection of fetal acidosis, remains a challenging signal processing task. Recently, a variant of the wavelet-based multifractal analysis, based on p-exponents and p-leaders, which provides a rich framework for data regularity analysis, has been proposed. The present contribution aims at studying the benefits of using t...

The electric fetal heart activity was firstly recorded as tiny deflections on maternal limb lead electrocardifogram (ECG) by Cremer [1], direct lead fetal ECG with needle electrode by Caldeyro-Barcia et al. [2] and with scalp lead clip electrode by Hon [3]. Indirect maternal abdominal lead fetal ECG (fECG) was recorded by Maeda and Nakano [4] and others. Intrapartum fetal heart rate (FHR) was m...

We hypothesized that the ability of the fetus to alter nutrient shunting and organ growth might be associated with uterine capacity. White crossbred gilts from a randomly selected control line, a line selected for ovulation rate, and a line selected for uterine capacity (UC) were unilaterally hysterectomized-ovariectomized at 160 d of age, mated at estrus, and slaughtered at 45, 65, 85, and 105...

The increasing functional integrity of the organism during fetal maturation is connected with increasing complex internal coordination. We hypothesize that time scales of complexity and dynamics of heart rate patterns reflect the increasing inter-dependencies within the fetal organism during its prenatal development. We investigated multi-scale complexity, time irreversibility and fractal scali...