The influence of signal loss episodes on fetal heart rate variability measures

The most important features indicating appropriate fetal development are the measures of instantaneous variability of a fetal heart rate (FHR), describing fluctuations of the beat-to-beat heart intervals. The most popular method for the FHR acquisition is the Doppler ultrasound technique. However, it is very sensitive to various motion artifacts distorting the signal being acquired. The aim of our work was to evaluate the influence of signal loss episodes on the parameters quantitatively describing the instantaneous variability of the FHR. For this purpose we artificially inserted signal loss episodes to the recordings, in different patterns and percentage, in accordance with the real characteristics of the signal loss segments. We particularly would like to answer the question if the signals with significant amount of signal loss can be reliably evaluated by means of instantaneous variability measures, and which of these measures (numerical indices) are more robust to the missing values.