Monitoring the unborns health
Finding out more about the health of unborn babies, currently often asks for invasive methods. Two of the most well know procedures are the CVL test, where doctors take out and examine a small piece of the placenta. And then there鈥檚 Amniocentesis, where a small amount of amniotic fluid is taken and examined. Both tests carry a +/- 2% risk of causing a miscarriage. Now, there is a way to eliminate even that small risk: Nemo Healthcare: a system that helps to isolate signals that tell us a lot about the status of unborn children: their bodily sounds. Ton Backx the director of our University Fund and an ambassador of cooperations and projects that provide the answers to today鈥檚 societal challenges. He tells us more about this project.
Focused listening to mother and child
Ton: Researchers at 黑料福利网 had developed a very special technique for signal analysis. It could separate very small signals, which were deeply hidden in large signals, based on differences in signal characteristics.
A doctor had this technique explained to him and wondered if you could use it to isolate the sounds of an unborn child. Like the small but rapid heartbeat that was difficult to distinguish from the other sounds in the mother's body. Perhaps it would even be possible to isolate the motility of the unborn from recorded major signals of the mother such as her heartbeat and her uterine activity.
The possibilities turned out to be even more extensive
These possibilities would make it a lot easier to collect data on the baby's health. The infant鈥檚 heart signal is very small and gets lost in the mother's recorded signals. That鈥檚 why detailed and continuous monitoring of the infant's signals was not possible without using invasive techniques. The idea of distinguishing signals proved more than feasible.
Ton: 鈥淭hey were even able to measure the unborn child's movements based on the detected changing orientation of the heart muscle. This created a new, non-invasive and highly detailed way to measure and monitor the health of unborn children.
If 黑料福利网 had been a more closed institution, perhaps nothing would have happened with the results of these studies or other applications would have been devised for them. Now we have another wonderful example of how technology can contribute to better health. In this case by giving the most vulnerable a much greater chance of a good start to their early life.
There鈥檚 more about promising projects
This is the second post about the results of 黑料福利网 researchers collaborating with specialists from the Maxima Medical Center. The first post is about monitoring premature babies鈥� health using fiber-optics. Click here to read it.
In the next post, you will find out why collaboration is in 黑料福利网鈥檚 DNA and what it has brought us.
