Exploring Fetal Health Status Using an Association Based Classification Approach

A healthy pregnancy leads to a healthy birth. So early and periodic fetal care improves the chances of a healthy pregnancy. Fetal health care is a process of taking care of a pregnant woman during the maternity cycle. Each pregnant woman should know everything that affects pregnancy outcome. Around 800 women die every day due to pregnancy and childbirth-related issues. Maternal health and fetal health are closely associated with each other because every year approximately 3 million newborn babies die. So there is a need for proper care including the prediction of risk levels before, during and after the delivery for the safety of both mother and child. Cardiotocography (CTG) is a tool for monitoring and predicting fetal well-being in pregnant women having some complicated problems. CTG avoids premature birth by providing data from the abdomen of the mother on the heart rate of the child. In this research, a classification based on association (CBA), a rule-based approach to the cardiotocographic analysis of fetal evaluation is suggested and the test findings showed that the associative classifier model created was 83% and 84% accurate, before and after feature selection respectively for classifying fetal health status.