Computed dip-parameters derived from digitized FHR-curves. I. The describing parameters and the method of digitizing

Cardiotocography (CTG), i. e. the recording of fetal cardiac actions and maternal uterine contractions offers a tremendous amount of new 1 Information about the state of the yet unborn child before and during birth. The visual Interpretation of CTG until now has been subjective and is based only upon descriptive criteria. The arbitrary introduction of catchwords has muddied the CTG nomenclature and made a precise communication of research reports quite difficult. For this reason and because not every clinician can be expected to have experience in the Interpretation of curves and detailed knowledge in biological feed-back Systems, the evaluation of the tracings is often uncertain and published results, at times, offer confusing Information. For the reasons cited, the search for criteria which describe the informational content of CTG or even Interpret them is understandable. This part of our work will point out an approach towards the derivation of descriptive CTG parameters. The subsequent part will examine these parameters in reference to the content of the clinical Information, and in the concluding part an evaluating CTG parameter is calculated from the descriptive parameters.