Time-Frequency Analysis of Electrohysterogram for Classification of Term and Preterm Birth

In this paper, a novel method for the classification of term and preterm birth is proposed based on time-frequency analysis of electrohysterogram (EHG) using multivariate empirical mode decomposition (MEMD). EHG is a promising study for preterm birth prediction, because it is low-cost and accurate compared to other preterm birth prediction methods, such as tocodynamometry (TOCO). Previous studies on preterm birth prediction applied prefilterings based on Fourier analysis of an EHG, followed by feature extraction and classification, even though Fourier analysis is suboptimal to biomedical signals, such as EHG, because of its nonlinearity and nonstationarity. Therefore, the proposed method applies prefiltering based on MEMD instead of Fourier-based prefilters before extracting the sample entropy feature and classifying the term and preterm birth groups. For the evaluation, the Physionet term-preterm EHG database was used where the proposed method and Fourier prefiltering-based method were adopted for comparative study. The result showed that the area under curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) was increased by 0.0351 when MEMD was used instead of the Fourier-based prefilter.