Synchronization between EMG at different uterine locations investigated using time-frequency ridge reconstruction: comparison of pregnancy and labor contractions

Abstract

The extraction of the frequency components of a signal can be useful for the characterization of the underlying system. One method for isolating a frequency component of a signal is by the extraction and reconstruction of the local maxima or ridge of its time-frequency representation. We compare here the performances of two well-known ridge reconstruction methods, namely the Carmona and Marseille methods, on synthetic signals as well as real electrohysterogram (EHG). We show that Carmona's method presents lower reconstruction errors. We then used the separately reconstructed frequency components of the EHG independently for labor prediction using a synchronization measure. We show that the proposed synchronization parameters present similar prediction rate to classical parameters obtained directly from the time-frequency representation but also seem to provide information complementary to the classical parameters and may thus improve the accuracy in labor prediction when they are used jointly.