Introducing Grammatical Evolution in Fetal Heart Rate Analysis and Classification

Electronic fetal monitoring is an essential tool for fetal surveillance during labor. It is mainly based on the monitoring and evaluation of the fetal heart rate (FHR) signal, which has to be interpreted online. Evaluation and interpretation of FHR gives an indication of the fetal condition. A lot of research efforts have been done towards the development of automatic and reliable methods for processing and evaluating FHR. This research work introduces an integrated methodology for processing and classifying FHR based on the novel approach of grammatical evolution for feature construction and selection. The proposed methodology is presented, and it is applied to a data set. Experimental results are promising paving the way for further research in that direction