Characterization of EHG contractions at term labor by nonlinear analysis

Uterine electromyogram on the abdomen of pregnant women (electrohysterogram, EHG) plays an interesting role to evaluate possible risks to the binomial mother-fetus. In this sense, the present study explored the characterization of contractions by EHG during active phase of labor at term in a population at low risk. The goal was to investigate the differences in the contractions generated by women that evolve labor to a vaginal delivery (group 1) to those associated with caesarean section (group 2). Abdominal signals were acquired using Ag-AgCl electrodes in a bipolar configuration and the EHG was obtained by band-pass filtering in the range of 0.3 to 4 Hz. Sample entropy (SampEn) was used to calculate the irregularity of manually selected contractions of the EHG time series. The results showed that it is plausible to discriminate contractions from both groups as the average SampEn was 2.1359 with a standard deviation of 0.0583 for group 1 (N=8), while for group 2 (N=8) was 2.0352 with standard deviation of 0.0946; it was found significant statistical difference between groups as p was 0.046. Consequently, the nonlinear analysis via SampEn of EHG could provide an index to evaluate the quality of the active phase labor at term.