A Perinatal Monitoring Display Based on the Fetal Topogram

One of the fundamental snags often encountered in the development of expert systems is the difficulty of effective liaison between the knowledge engineer and the specialists for whom the system is designed, especially when the latter have no engineering background. In our case, this problem has arisen in the course of working towards a comprehensive system for the automatic diagnosis and prognosis of fetal condition during labor, an important task which has traditionally been carried out by visual inspection of fetal heart rate and uterine pressure traces. Although the use of syntactic pattern recognition methods has enabled the system as it stands to achieve success rates of around 95 percent, its further improvement hinges on case-by-case interaction with obstetricians untrained in the concepts of discriminant analysis or formal grammar.