Some practical remarks on neural networks approach to fetal cardiotocograms classification

Cardiotocographic monitoring is a primary biophysical method for assessment of a fetal state based on quantitative analysis of the biophysical signals. Although the computerized fetal monitoring systems have become a standard in clinical centres, the effective methods, which could enable conclusion generation, are still being searched. In the proposed work the attempts have been made to answer some important questions, which occurred during application of neural network for classification of the fetal state as being normal or abnormal. These questions are particularly important for medical applications and concern the influence of data set organization, inputs representation and the network's architecture. The networks of MLP and RBF types were developed and tested using 50 trials, with randomly mixed data contents in learning, validating and testing subsets. Additionally, the influence of numerical and categorical representation of the input quantitative parameters describing fetal cardiotocograms on the efficiency of the learning process was tested.