A digital system for recording the electrical activity of the uterus.
The ability to identify true pre-term labour would be of considerable clinical benefit as electrical signals from the uterus, recorded using surface electrodes, may discriminate between labouring and non-labouring states in human pregnancy. A digital recording system for recording the electrical activity of the uterus has been developed and is described in this paper. A pilot study in which entire recordings in 21 women were subjected to power spectral analysis suggests that the relative power in two frequency bands (0.2-0.45 Hz and 0.8-3 Hz) changes as pregnancy progresses into early labour.
Snowden
S
S
Department of Medical Physics and Engineering, Leeds Teaching Hospitals, UK. s.snowden@leeds.ac.uk
Simpson
N A
NA
Walker
J J
JJ
D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D000669:Amplifiers, Electronic; D003625:Data Collection; D004566:Electrodes; D004576:Electromyography / Q000295:instrumentation*; D004594:Electrophysiology; D005260:Female; D005583:Fourier Analysis; D006801:Humans; D007743:Labor, Obstetric / Q000502:physiology*; D007752:Obstetric Labor, Premature / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology; D011247:Pregnancy; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D014599:Uterus / Q000502:physiology*