Cardiotocogram biomedical signal classification and interpretation for fetal health evaluation

Abstract

Maternal and Neonatal health has been greatly constrained by the in-access to essential maternal health care services due to the preventive measures implemented against the spread of covid-19 hence making maternal and fetal monitoring so hard for physicians. Besides maternal toxic stress caused by fear of catching covid-19, affordable mobility of pregnant mothers to skilled health practitioners in limited resource settings is another contributor to maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity. In this work, we leveraged existing health data to build interpretable Machine Learning (ML) models that allow physicians to offer precision maternal and fetal medicine based on biomedical signal classification results of fetal cardiotocograms (CTGs).We obtained 99%, 100% and 97% accuracy, precision and recall respectively for the LightGBM classification model without any GPU Learning resources. Then we explainably evaluated all built models with ELI5 and comprehensive feature extraction.