A multimodal dual-branch fusion network for fetal hypoxia detection

Labor is the most severe test of a fetus’s ability to survive hypoxia. Even low-risk full-term fetuses may endure variable degrees of hypoxia as a result of intrapartum uterine contractions. It is imperative for clinicians to expeditiously identify fetal hypoxia and implement timely interventions. However, due to the intricacy and intra-class variability of fetal heart rate (FHR) data, distinguishing normal babies from acidotic fetuses is extremely challenging. This research proposes a novel multimodal dual-branch fusion network to improve the accuracy of fetal hypoxia identification. The dual-branch network is constructed through the signal slicing method. Additionally, we present a novel attention guidance module that leverages spatial attention to capture hypoxia-related information from two branches of signal. Ultimately, the network integrates maternal electronic medical records, FHR features, and FHR signals to achieve multimodal fusion of the input features. Furthermore, label smoothing can yield better calibrated networks, thus improving classification performance even further. On the public dataset, this method obtained a sensitivity of 72.58 %, a specificity of 71.08 %, a quality index of 71.59 %, and an area under the curve of 74.70 %. This method combines maternal-fetal medicine and artificial intelligence, represents a new strategy to recognize fetal acidosis.