Sir,—The absolute significance of the findings of Eddleston and colleagues [1] would have been much clearer if they had compared the two extradural groups with a control group which did not receive extradural bupivacainc. Although this control group would have been self-selected and not subject to randomization, the group could have been matched as closely as possible to the two study groups. I...

Background: Extraction of Fetal ECG signal from non-invasive abdominal ECG signal is an important clinical application. Fetal ECG signal provides significant and valuable information about the fetal heart growth and health condition. Objective: Abdominal signals are usually corrupted by high amplitude maternal ECG signals and often found superimposed with the Fetal ECG signal. Suppression of ma...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the effects of high intensity interval training (HIIT) on the maternal heart, fetuses and placentas of pregnant rats. METHODS Female Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly assigned to HIIT or sedentary control groups. The HIIT group was trained for 6 weeks with 10 bouts of high intensity uphill running on a treadmill for four minutes (at 85-90% of maximal oxygen consumptio...

Fetal echocardiography has yet to have an impact on the treatment of congenital heart disease. Critical aortic valve stenosis was diagnosed by echocardiography before birth in a 35 week gestation fetus. The risks to the fetus and mother associated with prolonged rupture of membranes prompted their transport to a hospital with cardiac surgical and high-risk perinatal facilities. Prenatal and pos...

Background Prenatal diagnosis of congenital heart disease is important to ensure both informed parental counselling before birth, and effective planning of potentially life-saving interventions after birth. MRI offers a safe, radiationfree adjunct to conventional diagnostic modalities, particularly in mothers with high BMI or at later gestations where ultrasound may be limited. However, cardiov...

Fetal ultrasound screening during pregnancy plays a vital role in the early detection of fetal malformations which have potential long-term health impacts. The level skill required to diagnose such from live examination is high and resources for are often limited. We present an interpretable, atlas-learning segmentation method automatic diagnosis Hypo-plastic Left Heart Syndrome (HLHS) single ‘...

The aim of the study was to evaluate cardiovascular effects and fetal behavior during moxibustion, acupuncture or acupuncture plus moxibustion applied on the BL.67 acupoint of women (beside the outer corner of the 5th toenail) in fetal breech presentation. During the acupoint stimulation (20 min, two times a week), the women were submitted to computerized non-stress test. Fourteen cases were tr...

OBJECTIVE Monitoring of the fetal condition during labor is currently performed by cardiotocograpy (CTG). Despite the use of CTG in clinical practice, CTG interpretation suffers from a high inter- and intra-observer variability and a low specificity. In addition to CTG, analysis of fetal heart rate variability (HRV) has been shown to provide information on fetal distress. However, fetal HRV can...

Sustained fetal supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) with a heart rate of approximately 210 bpm may lead to increased atrial and venous pressures and congestive heart failure. There is no clear consensus regarding the best drug-treatment regimens for fetal SVT. However, considerable nonrandomized experience in the transmaternal treatment of fetal SVT is available with a number of antiarrhythmic a...