CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 4 (UPI) -- Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists have developed a system that can detect early subtle variations in the fetal heartbeat.
Such fluctuations in a fetus's heartbeat can indicate distress, but researchers said there currently is no way to detect such subtle variations except during labor, when it could be too late to prevent serious or even fatal complications.
The new system could allow much earlier monitoring of the fetal heartbeat with less expense than involved with other technologies, scientists said, and it might also reduce the rate of Cesarean deliveries by helping clinicians rule out potential problems that might otherwise prompt that procedure.
Gari Clifford, a principal research scientist at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, said he expects the system to be commercially available in two to three years, pending U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval.
Clifford and his principal colleagues -- Reza Sameni and Professor Mohammad Shamsollahi of Sharif University in Iran and Professor Christian Jutten of the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, France -- report their work in the journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering and in the Journal on Advances in Signal Processing.
