1 ANALYSIS OF THE PROPAGATION OF UTERINE ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY APPLIED TO PREDICT PRETERM LABOR
Mahmoud Hassan, Thierry Denoeux (president, Catherine Marque (supervisor, Brynjar Karlsson (supervisor, Lotfi Senhadji (reviewer, Sofiane Boudaoud (examiner · 2011
There are many open questions concerning the functioning of the human uterus. One of these open questions concerns exactly how the uterus operates as an organ to perform the very organized act of contracting in a synchronized fashion to expulse a new human into this world. If we don‟t understand how it works when it is working normally, it is obvious that we will not be as capable of intervening or preventing when, sometimes with tragic consequences, it does not do its job properly and a child is born before it is ready. The aim of our research is to be able to understand what the electrical activity of the uterus can tell us about the risk of premature birth, to understand better how the uterus works and to benefit from these understanding to find tool that can be used for labor detection and prediction of preterm labor. This idea of using the externally detected electrical activity of the uterus (electrohysterogram or EHG) to predict preterm labor is not new and lot of work has already been put into it. The novel approach in this work is not to use the signal collected from one or two isolated places on the expectant mother‟s abdomen but to map the propagation of the signals and to investigate the auto organization of the contractions. We therefore use a matrix of electrodes to give us a much more complete picture of the organization and operation of the uterus as pregnancy reaches its conclusion. Labor is the physiologic process by which a fetus is expelled from the uterus to the outside world and is defined as regular uterine contractions accompanied by cervical effacement and dilatation. In the normal labor, the uterine contractions and cervix dilatation are preceded by biochemical changes in the cervical connective tissue.