Computation of short-term fetal heart-rate variability from heart-rate waveforms.
Fetal heart-rate monitoring during labor is now routine in high-risk pregnancies. Beat-to-beat, or short-term variability in the heart rate has aroused considerable recent attention and several quantitative indices based on the fetal electrocardiogram have been proposed. These cannot be implemented on micro- or mini- computer-based labor-room systems without additional hardware because of the ECG processing involved. This paper describes a procedure for computing short-term variability from heart-rate waveforms. It correlates excellently with the above methods, but can be implemented on a microcomputer without special interfacing, since it uses only the slowly-varying heart-rate waveform.
D003201:Computers; D004562:Electrocardiography; D005260:Female; D005318:Fetal Heart / Q000502:physiology*; D005323:Fetal Monitoring / Q000379:methods*; D006339:Heart Rate; D006801:Humans; D008838:Microcomputers; D011247:Pregnancy; D013997:Time Factors