Differentiation of Term and Preterm Delivery Groups by Ehg Signal Analysis

This article deals with the analysis of Uterine EMG (EHG) signal of a pregnant woman to reveal whether the delivery is going to be preterm or term. In the studied project, various linear and non-linear signal-processing techniques were applied to three-channel uterine EMG records to separate term and pre-term deliveries. The preterm and term signals are differentiated by performing some operations like Mean, Variance on the both group of signals and they are correlated to find the difference by which they can be differentiated. The following preprocessing band-pass Butterworth filters were tested: 0.08–4, 0.3–4, and 0.3–3 Hz. With the 0.3–3 Hz filter, the median frequency indicated a statistical difference between those term and pre-term delivery records recorded before the 26th week (p = 0.03), and between all term and all preterm delivery records. Both techniques also showed noticeable differences between term delivery records recorded before and after the 26th week.