The influence of cardiotocogram signal feature selection method on fetal state assessment efficacy

Cardiotocographic (CTG) monitoring is a method of assessing fetal state. Since visual analysis of CTG signal is difficult, methods of automated qualitative fetal state evaluation on the basis of the quantitative description of the signal are applied. The appropriate selection of learning data influences the quality of the fetal state assessment with computational intelligence methods. In the presented work we examined three different feature selection procedures based on: principal components analysis, receiver operating characteristics and guidelines of International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics. To investigate their influence on the fetal state assessment quality the benchmark SisPorto® dataset and the Lagrangian support vector machine were used.