A deep feature fusion network for fetal state assessment

Abstract

CTG (cardiotocography) has consistently been used to diagnose fetal hypoxia. It is susceptible to identifying the average fetal acid-base balance but lacks specificity in recognizing prenatal acidosis and neurological impairment. CTG plays a vital role in intrapartum fetal state assessment, which can prevent severe organ damage if fetal hypoxia is detected earlier. In this paper, we propose a novel deep feature fusion network (DFFN) for fetal state assessment. First, we extract spatial and temporal information from the fetal heart rate (FHR) signal using a multiscale CNN-BiLSTM network, increasing the features’ diversity. Second, the multiscale CNN-BiLSM network and frequently used features are integrated into the deep learning model. The proposed DFFN model combines different features to improve classification accuracy. The multiscale convolutional kernels can identify specific essential information and consider signal’s temporal information. The proposed method achieves 61.97%, 73.82%, and 66.93% of sensitivity, specificity, and quality index, respectively, on the public CTU-UHB database. The proposed method achieves the highest QI on the private database, verifying the proposed method’s effectiveness and generalization. The proposed DFFN combines the advantages of feature engineering and deep learning models and achieves competitive accuracy in fetal state assessment compared with related works.