title: Fetal development assessed by heart rate patterns--time scales of complex autonomic control.
abstract: 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 scaling from 73 fetal magnetocardiographic 30min recordings over the third trimester. We found different scale dependent complexity changes, increasing medium scale time irreversibility, and increasing long scale fractal correlations (all changes p<0.05). The results confirm the importance of time scales to be considered in fetal heart rate based developmental indices.
authors.affiliation: University Hospital, Biomagnetic Center, Hans Berger Clinic for Neurology, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany. Dirk.Hoyer@biomag.uni-jena.de
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Hoyer
authors.forename: Samuel
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nowack
authors.forename: Stephan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bauer
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Tetschke
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ludwig
authors.forename: Liviu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Moraru
authors.forename: Anja
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rudoph
authors.forename: Ulrike
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Wallwitz
authors.forename: Franziska
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Jaenicke
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Haueisen
authors.forename: Ekkehard
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Schleussner
authors.forename: Uwe
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Schneider
mesh_terms: D001341:Autonomic Nervous System; D005260:Female; D047109:Fetal Development / Q000502:physiology*; D005323:Fetal Monitoring; D006340:Heart Rate, Fetal / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D053798:Magnetocardiography; D008955:Models, Cardiovascular; D011247:Pregnancy; D011296:Prenatal Diagnosis; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted