Visual analysis of fetal heart rate (FHR) during labor faces significant variability among different observers, especially when it comes to unusual recordings.
Automatic FHR analysis has been suggested as a way to minimize this variability, but it struggles primarily with establishing a consistent baseline for detecting heart rate changes.
In a study comparing eleven automatic analysis methods against expert-defined baselines from 66 FHR recordings, some methods showed better performance, yet none could consistently match the expert-defined baselines for all recordings.