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Selection algorithm for parameters to characterize uterine EHG signals for the detection of preterm labor

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Abstract

This article proposes a selection method that can be applied to choose the best parameters to classify contractions in the uterine electrohysterography (EHG) signal for the detection of preterm labor. Several types of parameters have historically been extracted from the electrohysterogram. These can be divided into three classes: linear parameters, nonlinear parameters and parameters related to the electrohyterogram propagation. Frequency band enhancement EHG characterization has also been extensively studied. Our work is divided in two parts. The first part is to implement and compute all the parameters already extracted from the EHG that have been published in the literature. These parameters were computed both on the original EHG and on different frequency bands obtained using wavelet packet decomposition. In the second part, we will use a new parameters selection method to eliminate all parameters that are not efficient and pertinent for classification. Our results indicate a set of 13 linear parameters, 3 nonlinear parameters and 2 propagation parameters that are potentially most useful to discriminate between pregnancy and labor contractions, either on different frequency bands or directly on original EHG.

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Abbreviations

a :

Degree of polynomial function

\(\alpha \) :

scaling exponent alpha

B :

Number of bins of histogram

C :

Constant

\(C_{m}\) :

number of pattern matches

D1, D2, D3, D4, D5, D6, D7, D8 and D9:

Deciles

D5:

Median frequency

DFA:

Detrended fluctuation analysis

\(D_{Je} \left( {H,G} \right) \) :

Jeffrey divergence

\(\Vert \Delta _{{d}_0 } \Vert \) :

Euclidean distance between two states of the system to an arbitrary time \(t_0 \)

\(\Vert \Delta _{{d}_{t}} \Vert \) :

Euclidean distance between the two states of the system at a time later \(t\)

EHG:

Uterine electrohysterographic signal, electrohysterogram

F(n):

Fluctuation function

\(f(x_{u})\) :

Linear piecewise approximation of the nonlinear regression curve

FNN:

False nearest neighbors

\(\varPhi _{x}(t)\) :

Unwrapped phases of the signals x

\(\varPhi _{y}(t)\) :

Unwrapped phases of the signals y

\(\varphi _{e,f} \) :

Phase synchronization principle

\(\gamma _{e,f}\) :

Phase synchronization called “mean phase coherence”

\(H=\{h_{z}\}\) and \(G=\{g_{z}\}\) :

\(H\) and \(G\) are the two histograms

\(H^{2}\) :

Nonlinear correlation coefficient

IF:

Instantaneous frequency

LE:

Lyapunov exponent

m :

Length of sequence

MPF:

Mean frequency

n :

Length of box

N :

Length of the signal

p :

Number of sliding windows

PF:

Peak frequency

PL:

Preterm labor

\(\hbox {PSD}, S_{x}(f)\) :

Power spectral density

r :

Tolerance for accepting

\(R^{2 }\) :

Linear correlation coefficient

SE:

Sample entropy

threshold1:

Mean+1*standard deviation

threshold2:

Mean+2*standard deviation

Tr:

Time reversibility

\(\tau \) :

Time delay

VarEn:

Variance entropy

Vb7:

Bipolar channel 7

Vb8:

Bipolar channel 8

Vbi:

Vertical bipolar signals

W1, W2, W3, W4 and W5:

Variances on the five selected detail levels

\(X\left( k \right) \) :

New integrated series

x :

EHG bipolar channel Vb7

\(x_{l}\) :

l-th segment of \(x\)

\(\overline{x}\) :

Mean of x

y :

EHG bipolar channel Vb8

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Acknowledgments

We are indebted to French Regional Council of Picardy and FEDER funds for funding this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS URM 7338 Biomécanique et Bio-ingénierie, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, Compiègne, France

    D. Alamedine, A. Diab & C. Marque

  2. Laboratoire LASTRE, EDST-Centre Azm pour la Recherche en Biotechnologie et ses Applications, Université libanaise, Tripoli, Liban

    D. Alamedine & M. Khalil

  3. School of Science and Engineering, Reykjavik University, Reykjavik , 101, Iceland

    A. Diab & B. Karlsson

  4. CGO, Amiens, France

    C. Muszynski

Authors
  1. D. Alamedine
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  2. A. Diab
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  3. C. Muszynski
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  4. B. Karlsson
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  5. M. Khalil
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  6. C. Marque
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Correspondence to M. Khalil.

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Alamedine, D., Diab, A., Muszynski, C. et al. Selection algorithm for parameters to characterize uterine EHG signals for the detection of preterm labor. SIViP 8, 1169–1178 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-014-0655-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-014-0655-2

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