This project will improve the current state of fetal health monitoring during labor and delivery, an healthcare issue that touches almost every family. Since introduction of electronic fetal monitoring (EFM) to the labor and delivery rooms about half a century ago, the national rate of Cesarean section deliveries has risen five-fold. The main need driving Cesarean sections is a concern for oxygen deprivation in the fetsus' brain or hypoxic brain injury. These injuries result in problems such as cerebral palsy. While the number of Cesarean sections has increased, the rates of various health conditions associated hypoxia remain unchanged. The fundamental problem with EFM is that besides hypoxia, a number of innocuous factors can cause alarming EFM traces, which may lead to unnecessary medical interventions. The project aims to address this problem by research, development and validation of technology for non-invasive transabdominal measurement of fetal arterial blood oxygen saturation. Furthermore, the project includes specific education and outreach activities that are driven by integration of research results into courses, and recruitment and retention of students from underrepresented backgrounds into STEM education.
This proposal to address these issues through development of non-invasive measurement of fetal blood oxygen saturation. The project develops a comprehensive set of tissue models that consider inter-patient variation and intrapartum dynamics, to allow investigation of the fundamentals of light propagation in the abdominal area in the context of labor and delivery. The project involves shining near infrared light at several carefully selected wavelengths into the maternal abdomen, followed by transabdominal sensing of diffuse reflectance light, and isolation of very weak fetal photo-plethysmographs from the maternal and other noises contributing to the sensed signal. Several approaches to improve system robustness in face of intrapartum dynamics, such as adaptive noise canceling, time-resolved spectroscopy for dynamic calibration, and correlated measurements via a sensor array will be investigated. An extensive evaluation plan involving hypoxic pregnant sheep models and human subjects will be carried out.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
