In January's Guest Editorial, Sarah Stock and Jenny Myers discuss approaches to fetal and neonatal growth assessment.

background: fetal heart rate (fhr) extracted from abdominal electrocardiogram (ecg) is a powerful non-invasive method in appropriately assessing the fetus well-being during pregnancy. despite significant advances in the field of electrocardiography, the analysis of fetal ecg (fecg) signal is considered a challenging issue which is mainly due to low signal to noise ratio (snr) of fecg. objective...

background the most common space occupying lesions of the fetal thorax are congenital diaphragmatic hernia (cdh), congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation (ccam), and bronchopulmonary sequestration (bps). although applications of prenatal mri have been vastly improved in the recent years, its use in the assessment of space occupying lesions of the fetal chest differs among centers. objectives...

OBJECTIVES To establish values of fetal left brachiocephalic vein (LBCV) dimensions during normal pregnancy and determine whether routine assessment of the LBCV may help in identifying fetuses with congenital abnormalities of this vessel. METHODS Fetal LBCV was assessed prospectively during ultrasound examinations in 431 normal singleton pregnancies. The visualization rate of the transverse v...

conclusions in the absence of associated anomalies, the risk of incidence of adverse events does not appear to be increased significantly with isolated sua. therefore, supplementary assessment and invasive tests are not recommended in fetuses with isolated sua, unless fetal abnormalities are detected in routine evaluations. background the umbilical cord normally consists of two arteries and one...

A simplified scoring system for clinically determining fetal maturation of newly born infants has been developed and provides accurate assessment of gestational age in either well or sick babies. Certain conditions render individual criteria within the score less reliable but do not significantly lessen the reliability of the total assessment. The optimal age for maturational assessment is betw...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether assessment of ductus venosus flow at 11-13 weeks' gestation improves the detection rate of cardiac defects achieved by screening with nuchal translucency (NT) thickness. METHODS Prospective first-trimester screening for aneuploidies, including measurement of fetal NT and assessment of ductus venosus flow. The performance of different combinations of increased fe...

In this paper we discussed the influence of preliminary processing of the ultrasound Doppler signal on accuracy of the fetal heart rate estimation as well as on reliability of the FHR instantaneous variability assessment. We attempted to develop an optimal processing channel of US Doppler signal in order to measure the periodicity of fetal heart activity with accuracy as close as possible to th...

The relationship between the enzyme phosphatidate phosphohydrolase (PAPase) and lecithin/sphingomyelin (L/S) ratio in amniotic fluid was evaluated in normal human pregnancies and in several pregnancies complicated by Rh isoimmunization. An increase in PAPase activity in amniotic fluid appears to parallel the increase in L/S ratio after 33 weeks gestation in normal subjects. These data suggest t...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the influence of the crown-rump length and body mass index on sonographic evaluation of the fetal heart using abdominal and vaginal routes in the first trimester of pregnancy. METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional study with 57 pregnant women between 12-14 weeks (CRL< 84 mm). We evaluated the following fetal cardiac plans using the abdominal and vaginal routes: four-cha...