p-leader based classification of first stage intrapartum fetal HRV

Interpretation and analysis of intrapartum fetal heart rate, enabling early detection of fetal acidosis, remains a challenging signal processing task. Recently, a variant of the wavelet-based multifractal analysis, based on p-exponents and p-leaders, which provides a rich framework for data regularity analysis, has been proposed. The present contribution aims at studying the benefits of using the p-leader multifractal formalism for discrimination of intrapartum fetal heart rate. First, a dependence on p of the multifractal properties of data is evidenced and interpreted. Second, classification between healthy subjects and fetuses suffering from acidosis is shown to have satisfactory performance that increases when p is decreased. Keywords— wavelets, multifractal analysis, p-leaders, intrapartum, fetal heart rate variability, acidosis detection.