Uterine myoelectrical activity as biomarker of successful induction with Dinoprostone: Influence of parity

[EN] The prolonged latent phase of Induction of Labour (IOL) is associated with increased risks of maternal mortality and morbidity. Electrohysterography (EHG) has outperformed traditional clinical measures monitoring labour progress. Although parity is agreed to be of particular relevance to the success of IOL, no previous EHG¿related studies have been found in the literature. We thus aimed to identify EHG¿biomarkers to predict IOL success (active phase of labour in¿¿¿24¿h) and determine the influence of the myoelectrical response on the parity of this group. Statistically significant and sustained differences between the successful and failed groups were found from 150¿min in amplitude and non¿linear parameters, especially in Spectral Entropy and in their progression rates. In the nulliparous¿parous comparison, parous women showed statistically significantly higher amplitude progression rate. These biomarkers would therefore be useful for early detection of the risk of induction failure and would help to develop more robust and generalizable IOL success¿prediction systems.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE RTI2018-094449-A-I00-AR and PID2021-124038OB-I00). Funding for open access charge: CRUE-Universitat Politècnica de ValènciaDiaz-Martinez, A.; Monfort-Ortiz, R.; Ye Lin, Y.; Garcia-Casado, J.; Nieto-Tous, M.; Nieto Del-Amor, F.; Diago-Almela, VJ.... (2023). Uterine myoelectrical activity as biomarker of successful induction with Dinoprostone: Influence of parity. Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering (Online). 43(1):142-156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbe.2022.12.00414215643

Optimized Feature Subset Selection Using Genetic Algorithm for Preterm Labor Prediction Based on Electrohysterography

[EN] Electrohysterography (EHG) has emerged as an alternative technique to predict preterm labor, which still remains a challenge for the scientific-technical community. Based on EHG parameters, complex classification algorithms involving non-linear transformation of the input features, which clinicians found difficult to interpret, were generally used to predict preterm labor. We proposed to use genetic algorithm to identify the optimum feature subset to predict preterm labor using simple classification algorithms. A total of 203 parameters from 326 multichannel EHG recordings and obstetric data were used as input features. We designed and validated 3 base classifiers based on k-nearest neighbors, linear discriminant analysis and logistic regression, achieving F1-score of 84.63 ± 2.76%, 89.34 ± 3.5% and 86.87 ± 4.53%, respectively, for incoming new data. The results reveal that temporal, spectral and non-linear EHG parameters computed in different bandwidths from multichannel recordings provide complementary information on preterm labor prediction. We also developed an ensemble classifier that not only outperformed base classifiers but also reduced their variability, achieving an F1-score of 92.04 ± 2.97%, which is comparable with those obtained using complex classifiers. Our results suggest the feasibility of developing a preterm labor prediction system with high generalization capacity using simple easy-to-interpret classification algorithms to assist in transferring the EHG technique to clinical practice.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the European Regional Development Fund (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE RTI2018-094449-A-I00-AR) and by the Generalitat Valenciana (AICO/2019/220).Nieto-Del-Amor, F.; Prats-Boluda, G.; Martínez-De-Juan, JL.; Díaz-Martínez, MDA.; Monfort-Ortiz, R.; Diago-Almela, VJ.; Ye Lin, Y. (2021). Optimized Feature Subset Selection Using Genetic Algorithm for Preterm Labor Prediction Based on Electrohysterography. Sensors. 21(10):1-15. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21103350S115211

Assessment of Dispersion and Bubble Entropy Measures for Enhancing Preterm Birth Prediction Based on Electrohysterographic Signals

[EN] One of the remaining challenges for the scientific-technical community is predicting preterm births, for which electrohysterography (EHG) has emerged as a highly sensitive prediction technique. Sample and fuzzy entropy have been used to characterize EHG signals, although they require optimizing many internal parameters. Both bubble entropy, which only requires one internal parameter, and dispersion entropy, which can detect any changes in frequency and amplitude, have been proposed to characterize biomedical signals. In this work, we attempted to determine the clinical value of these entropy measures for predicting preterm birth by analyzing their discriminatory capacity as an individual feature and their complementarity to other EHG characteristics by developing six prediction models using obstetrical data, linear and non-linear EHG features, and linear discriminant analysis using a genetic algorithm to select the features. Both dispersion and bubble entropy better discriminated between the preterm and term groups than sample, spectral, and fuzzy entropy. Entropy metrics provided complementary information to linear features, and indeed, the improvement in model performance by including other non-linear features was negligible. The best model performance obtained an F1-score of 90.1 ± 2% for testing the dataset. This model can easily be adapted to real-time applications, thereby contributing to the transferability of the EHG technique to clinical practice.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the European Regional Development Fund (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE RTI2018-094449-A-I00-AR), and by the Generalitat Valenciana (AICO/2019/220)Nieto Del-Amor, F.; Beskhani, R.; Ye Lin, Y.; Garcia-Casado, J.; Díaz-Martínez, MDA.; Monfort-Ortiz, R.; Diago-Almela, VJ.... (2021). Assessment of Dispersion and Bubble Entropy Measures for Enhancing Preterm Birth Prediction Based on Electrohysterographic Signals. Sensors. 21(18):1-17. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21186071S117211

Combination of Feature Selection and Resampling Methods to Predict Preterm Birth Based on Electrohysterographic Signals from Imbalance Data

Due to its high sensitivity, electrohysterography (EHG) has emerged as an alternative technique for predicting preterm labor. The main obstacle in designing preterm labor prediction models is the inherent preterm/term imbalance ratio, which can give rise to relatively low performance. Numerous studies obtained promising preterm labor prediction results using the synthetic minority oversampling technique. However, these studies generally overestimate mathematical models’ real generalization capacity by generating synthetic data before splitting the dataset, leaking information between the training and testing partitions and thus reducing the complexity of the classification task. In this work, we analyzed the effect of combining feature selection and resampling methods to overcome the class imbalance problem for predicting preterm labor by EHG. We assessed undersampling, oversampling, and hybrid methods applied to the training and validation dataset during feature selection by genetic algorithm, and analyzed the resampling effect on training data after obtaining the optimized feature subset. The best strategy consisted of undersampling the majority class of the validation dataset to 1:1 during feature selection, without subsequent resampling of the training data, achieving an AUC of 94.5 ± 4.6%, average precision of 84.5 ± 11.7%, maximum F1-score of 79.6 ± 13.8%, and recall of 89.8 ± 12.1%. Our results outperformed the techniques currently used in clinical practice, suggesting the EHG could be used to predict preterm labor in clinics