EHG Signal Analysis for Prediction of Term and Preterm using Variational Mode Decomposition and Artificial Neural Networks

Preterm deliveries are an important cause of mortality and morbidity in newborns. Accurate and early prediction of a premature delivery can prove helpful in providing proper medication and treatment. Recording of electrical activity known as Electrohysterogram (EHG) from the abdominal surface of pregnant women corresponds to the uterus contractions. A new direction is open using EHG signals for the diagnosis of preterm births. In this research, we present a new method for the accurate classification of preterm and term EHG signals. The proposed method first filters a three-channel EHG signal using bandpass filters. Next, we combined the filtered three-channel EHG into one signal using an accumulation operation. The accumulated EHG signal was post-processed through variational mode decomposition (VMD). VMD algorithm splits the input signal into finite modes using center frequencies known as intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). An energy-based intelligent signal reconstruction approach is designed to combine IMFs having an energy level above the computed threshold. Next, the reconstructed EHG signals were split into continuous windows, and time, frequency, and Hjorth features were extracted. These features were fused to construct a distinct feature representation and were reduced using the ReliefF algorithm. We trained an artificial neural network (ANN) to obtain 98.8 % average accuracy using 10-fold cross-validation.