Perinatal asphyxia poses a significant risk to neonatal health, necessitating accurate fetal heart rate monitoring for effective detection and management. The current gold standard, cardiotocography, ...has inherent limitations, highlighting the need for alternative approaches. The emerging technology of non-invasive fetal electrocardiography shows promise as a new sensing technology for fetal cardiac activity, offering potential advancements in the detection and management of perinatal asphyxia. Although algorithms for fetal QRS detection have been developed in the past, only a few of them demonstrate accurate performance in the presence of noise and artifacts.
In this work, we propose
, a new algorithm for fetal QRS detection combining power spectral density and matched filter techniques. We benchmark
against three open-source algorithms on two recently published datasets (Abdominal and Direct Fetal ECG Database: ADFECG, subsets B1 Pregnancy and B2 Labour; Non-invasive Multimodal Foetal ECG-Doppler Dataset for Antenatal Cardiology Research: NInFEA).
Our results show that
outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on ADFECG (B1 Pregnancy: 99.5% ± 0.5% F1-score, B2 Labour: 98.0% ± 3.0% F1-score) and on NInFEA in three of six electrode configurations by being more robust against noise.
Through this work, we contribute to improving the accuracy and reliability of fetal cardiac monitoring, an essential step toward early detection of perinatal asphyxia with the long-term goal of reducing costs and making prenatal care more accessible.
Preterm births account for more than 10 % of all newborns. An adverse fetal presentation is a risk factor for intrapartum and neonatal mortality. To date, no technology enables a longitudinal, ...ubiquitous, and unobtrusive monitoring of fetal presentation. This study presents a first approach to fetal orientation detection based on non-invasive fetal electrocardiography (NI-fECG) using the non-invasive multi-modal foetal ECG-Doppler data set for antenatal cardiology research. The data set contains 60 recordings from 39 pregnant women (21-27 weeks), including NI-fECG and ultrasound position ground truth. We evaluated both handcrafted and generic features for five different classifiers (k-Nearest-Neighbor, Decision Tree Classifier, Support Vector Classification, AdaBoost Classifier, and Multilayer Perceptron) using cross-validation on subject splits on a cleaned subset. Best results for the distinction between vertex (head down) and breech (head up) were achieved using an AdaBoost classifier with a balanced accuracy of 86.5 ± 15.0 %. With this work, we take a first step towards longitudinal fetal presentation monitoring, which contributes to a better understanding of reduced fetal movements and extends the potential applications of NI-fECG in prenatal care. In future work, we will expand our classification system to detect more detailed fetal presentations using a newly created data set.
The CARMA1/CARD11-BCL10-MALT1 (CBM) complex bridges T and B cell antigen receptor (TCR/BCR) ligation to MALT1 protease activation and canonical nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) signaling. Using unbiased ...mass spectrometry, we discover multiple serine phosphorylation sites in the MALT1 C terminus after T cell activation. Phospho-specific antibodies reveal that CBM-associated MALT1 is transiently hyper-phosphorylated upon TCR/CD28 co-stimulation. We identify a dual role for CK1α as a kinase that is essential for CBM signalosome assembly as well as MALT1 phosphorylation. Although MALT1 phosphorylation is largely dispensable for protease activity, it fosters canonical NF-κB signaling in Jurkat and murine CD4 T cells. Moreover, constitutive MALT1 phosphorylation promotes survival of activated B cell-type diffuse large B cell lymphoma (ABC-DLBCL) cells addicted to chronic BCR signaling. Thus, MALT1 phosphorylation triggers optimal NF-κB activation in lymphocytes and survival of lymphoma cells.
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•Discovery of T cell stimulation-induced MALT1 phosphorylation•CK1α activity regulates CBM complex assembly and MALT1 phosphorylation•MALT1 phosphorylation controls canonical NF-κB signaling in T cells•MALT1 phosphorylation promotes survival of ABC-DLBCL tumor cells
Gehring et al. identify MALT1 phosphorylation as a process that bridges antigen receptor ligation to downstream signaling pathways in T cells, promotes T lymphocyte activation, and drives survival of B cell lymphoma tumor cells.
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