Fetal birthweight prediction with measured data by a temporal machine learning method

Background Birthweight is an important indicator during the fetal development process to protect the maternal and infant safety. However, birthweight is difficult to be directly measured, and is usually roughly estimated by the empirical formulas according to the experience of the doctors in clinical practice. Methods This study attempts to combine multiple electronic medical records with the B-ultrasonic examination of pregnant women to construct a hybrid birth weight predicting classifier based on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. The clinical data were collected from 5,759 Chinese pregnant women who have given birth, with more than 57,000 obstetric electronic medical records. We evaluated the prediction by the mean relative error (MRE) and the accuracy rate of different machine learning classifiers at different predicting periods for first delivery and multiple deliveries. Additionally, we evaluated the classification accuracies of different classifiers respectively for the Small-for-Gestational-age (SGA), Large-for-Gestational-Age (LGA) and Appropriate-for-Gestational-Age (AGA) groups. Results The results show that the accuracy rate of the prediction model using Convolutional Neuron Networks (CNN), Random Forest (RF), Linear-Regression, Support Vector Regression (SVR), Back Propagation Neural Network(BPNN), and the proposed hybrid-LSTM at the 40th pregnancy week for first delivery were 0.498, 0.662, 0.670, 0.680, 0.705 and 0.793, respectively. Among the groups of less than 39th pregnancy week, the 39th pregnancy week and more than 40th week, the hybrid-LSTM model obtained the best accuracy and almost the least MRE compared with those of machine learning models. Not surprisingly, all the machine learning models performed better than the empirical formula. In the SGA, LGA and AGA group experiments, the average accuracy by the empirical formula, logistic regression (LR), BPNN, CNN, RF and Hybrid-LSTM were 0.780, 0.855, 0.890, 0.906, 0.916 and 0.933, respectively. Conclusions The results of this study are helpful for the birthweight prediction and development of guidelines for clinical delivery treatments. It is also useful for the implementation of a decision support system using the temporal machine learning prediction model, as it can assist the clinicians to make correct decisions during the obstetric examinations and remind pregnant women to manage their weight.