Non-invasive monitoring and evaluating cardiac function of pregnant women based on a relative value method

This paper proposed a relative value method for measuring the indicators of cardiac reserve and investigated the application on monitoring and evaluating cardiac function for pregnant women. A heart sound sensor is placed at the precordial region to detect phonocardiogram. In order to access the cardiac reserve mobilization level during pregnancy, the cardiac reserve indicators of 1,683 normal pregnant women, 96 abnormal cases with different obstetric complications and 624 non-pregnant women were measured, analyzed and compared. The result shows that the differences between the indicators of pregnant and non-pregnant women were significant (p < 0.05). The ratio of diastolic to systolic duration (D/S) was obviously declined with the increase of gestational weeks and the occurrence of obstetric complication. This very encouraging result indicates that the D/S can be used as an indicator for evaluating the cardiac safety of parturition, which provides a reference for cardiac safety assessment of pregnant women.