Our goal in this project was to try and help the doctor in the delivery room to reach certain conclusions about the health of a fetus.
Abstract
Our goal in this project was to try and help the doctor in the delivery room to reach certain conclusions about the health of a fetus. The Important thing about our project was that it does this job without any harm to the fetus or the woman who’s carrying it – The whole process is being carried out outside the human body.
The input of this project is Ultra-sound signals (‘US signals’) which are being sampled by The doctor who’s in the delivery room. They are sampled from two specific places: The Aorta of the fetus, and the Umbilical Cord which connects the fetus and the woman who’s carrying it. The signals were recorded on Analogic tape cassette. Then, we used a 12 bit A/D converter, and using the “Lab-View”, we sampled the signals into files in *.txt format. The rate of the sampling was 5Khz.
Now, we could begin the “real” work on the signals. First, we used a High-Pass Filter, so that we can “clean” the signal from noises which were added during the sampling and the transformation, such as little and unintentional movements of the doctor while he sampled the US signals, or maybe the slow and yet disturbing rotation of the anlogic tape cassette on which the US signals were recorded on.
Now, we transformed the signals into the Frequency plain, using Short-time Fourier Transform. We cut the signals into parts, 100 samples each, and did the Fourier Transformation. The result is an interesting and quite remarkable 3-dimensional graph – where the X axis represents the time, The Y axis represents the Frequncy, and the Z axis represents the Energy level. The signals in the Frequency plain look like a series of triangles. The graph below is an example to this transformation:
Now, we tried to find the start of each and every pulse of the hearts, both the fetus’ and of the woman who’s carrying it. Finding the heart rate of each one of the fetuses and calculating its’ variability, should give the doctor in charge quite a lot of data to try and estimate the fetus’ condition. Plus, we calculated the TVI- Time Velocity Integral, which gives the doctor in charge an estimation of the blood flow in the fetus.
Here are some of the results we achieved:
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank everybody who assisted us in carrying out our project:
Prof Dan Adam, Dr. Israel Taller, and special thanks to B.Sc Johanan Erez and the PSPL laboratory stuff.
The Ollendorff Minerva Center Fund supported this projec