Automatic Doppler signal analysis to assess utero-placental circulation for identifying high risk pregnancies

High risk pregnancy conditions such as preeclampsia, pregnancy induced hypertension, intra-uterine growth restriction and gestational diabetes are associated with defective utero-placental circulation. These conditions, if undetected early during pregnancy, are associated with poor pregnancy outcomes including high morbidity/mortality for the fetus/mother. The current state of the art for monitoring such conditions is via (color) Doppler ultrasound with key clinical parameters being observed in uterine and umbilical arteries being the resistance index (RI), pulsatility index (PI) and AB index and early diastolic notching. High risk conditions in pregnancy manifest as abnormal flow profiles and indices in select fetal/maternal blood vessels. These parameters are gold standard as far as current clinical practice goes but they still suffer from low sensitivity in detecting and predicting the above mentioned high risk conditions at an earlier stage. In this paper, we propose a method based on Doppler signal analysis that automatically identifies the above conditions with higher sensitivity even when the current RI/PI indices are normal.