Dynamic Multi-Layer Perceptron for Fetal Health Classification Using Cardiotocography Data

Fetal health care is vital in ensuring the health of pregnant women and the fetus. Regular check-ups need to be taken by the mother to determine the status of the fetus’ growth and identify any potential problems. To know the status of the fetus, doctors monitor blood reports, Ultrasounds, cardiotocography (CTG) data, etc. Still, in this research, we have considered CTG data, which provides information on heart rate and uterine contractions during pregnancy. Several researchers have proposed various methods for classifying the status of fetus growth. Manual processing of CTG data is time-consuming and unreliable. So, automated tools should be used to classify fetal health. This study proposes a novel neural network-based architecture, the Dynamic Multi-Layer Perceptron model, evaluated from a single layer to several layers to classify fetal health. Various strategies were applied, including pre-processing data using techniques like Balancing, Scaling, Normalization hyperparameter tuning, batch normalization, early stopping, etc., to enhance the model’s performance. A comparative analysis of the proposed method is done against the traditional machine learning models to showcase its accuracy (97%). An ablation study without any pre-processing techniques is also illustrated. This study easily provides valuable interpretations for healthcare professionals in the decision-making process.