Human Fetus Health Classification on Cardiotocographic Data Using Random Forests

Pregnancy and fetus development is an extremely complex biological process that, while generally successful and without complications, can go wrong. One of the methods to determine if the fetus is developing according to expectations is cardiotocography. This diagnostic technique’s purpose is to measure the heartbeat of the fetus and uterine contractions of its mother, usually during the third trimester of pregnancy when the fetus’ heart is fully functional. Outputs of a cardiotocogram are usually interpreted as belonging to one of three states: physiological, suspicious and pathological. Automatic classification of these states based on cardiotocographic data is the goal of this paper. In this research, the Random Forest method is show to perform very well, capable of classifying the data with 94.69% accuracy. A comparison with the Classification and Regression Tree and Self-organizing Map methods is also provided.

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