Developing An Animal Model Of Fetal Cardiac Signal Processing Framework For Screening Foetal Hypoxia

Abstract

Oxygen is also a critical chemical that regulates many aspects of the body. Reduction in the oxygen levels triggers several responses in the body in order to compensate for the low level of oxygen. The low level in oxygen is termed as hypoxia. Hypoxia induces changes on the processes undergone by the nervous system which also consequently affects the cardiovascular system. In order to understand the physiological changes that occur due to hypoxia; models that describe them should be formulated. Those models are usually formulated based on experiments performed on animals. Another present challenge is related to the formation of models of fetus in utero. Due to the tiny sizes of fetus, researches usually find difficulties to track fetus development especially when it comes to nervous system development and presence of a complication such as hypoxia. The aim of this paper is to understand fetal nervous system development and the effect of hypoxia on HRV analysis using signal-processing techniques. We found that fetal mouse react to the autonomic blockade in almost similar to maternal mice do. The result showed the sympathetic influence if chronic hypoxia and parasympathetic influence for acute hypoxia using mentioned experimental protocol. The used method will support medical doctors and researcher in indicating hypoxia condition during pregnancy cases. Further HRV methods can be used for understanding of human hypoxia condition in depth as the subjects used and dosage might by limitation of this research. Indexing Terms: Neurodevelopment, hypoxia, Heart rate variability, fetal mouse, fetal ECG.

Date of Award	May 2018
Original language	American English
Supervisor	AHSAN Khandoker (Supervisor)