Fetal development assessed by heart rate patterns--time scales of complex autonomic control

Dirk Hoyer; Samuel Nowack; Stephan Bauer; Florian Tetschke; Stefan Ludwig; Liviu Moraru; Anja Rudoph; Ulrike Wallwitz; Franziska Jaenicke; Jens Haueisen; Ekkehard Schleussner; Uwe Schneider

doi:10.1016/j.compbiomed.2011.05.003

Fetal development assessed by heart rate patterns--time scales of complex autonomic control

Comput Biol Med. 2012 Mar;42(3):335-41. doi: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2011.05.003. Epub 2011 May 31.

Authors

Dirk Hoyer¹, Samuel Nowack, Stephan Bauer, Florian Tetschke, Stefan Ludwig, Liviu Moraru, Anja Rudoph, Ulrike Wallwitz, Franziska Jaenicke, Jens Haueisen, Ekkehard Schleussner, Uwe Schneider

Affiliation

¹ University Hospital, Biomagnetic Center, Hans Berger Clinic for Neurology, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany. Dirk.Hoyer@biomag.uni-jena.de

PMID: 21621201
DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2011.05.003

Abstract

The increasing functional integrity of the organism during fetal maturation is connected with increasing complex internal coordination. We hypothesize that time scales of complexity and dynamics of heart rate patterns reflect the increasing inter-dependencies within the fetal organism during its prenatal development. We investigated multi-scale complexity, time irreversibility and fractal scaling from 73 fetal magnetocardiographic 30min recordings over the third trimester. We found different scale dependent complexity changes, increasing medium scale time irreversibility, and increasing long scale fractal correlations (all changes p<0.05). The results confirm the importance of time scales to be considered in fetal heart rate based developmental indices.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Autonomic Nervous System
Female
Fetal Development / physiology*
Fetal Monitoring
Heart Rate, Fetal / physiology*
Humans
Magnetocardiography
Models, Cardiovascular*
Pregnancy
Prenatal Diagnosis
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted*