Brain Ischemia

Early and reliable detection of fetal brain injury remains an unsolved challenge in fetal health monitoring. The Frasch Lab develops heart rate variability (HRV) based approaches to address this challenge.

Overview

Using fetal sheep models, we demonstrated that fetal HRV functions as a non-invasive detection tool, outperforming standard FHR monitoring for identifying asphyxia near-term. We identified why conventional monitors struggle with detecting fetal acidemia and advanced toward identifying individual cardiovascular decompensation events—critical indicators of incipient brain damage.

Key Publications

• Frasch et al. (2009) — "Heart rate variability analysis allows early asphyxia detection in ovine fetus." Reprod Sci. 16(5):509-17
• Durosier et al. (2014) — Established that sampling frequency significantly impacts acidemia detection capability. Front. Pediatr.
• Li et al. (2015) — Confirmed sampling frequency effects on pH and base excess prediction. Physiol Meas. 36(5):L1-12
• Gold, Frasch et al. (2018) — Introduced stochastic change-point detection algorithms for biological signal analysis. Frontiers in Physiology
• Gold et al. (2019) — Developed predictive models for fetal cardiovascular decompensation during labor. arXiv preprint
• Fetal brain injury detection via HRV — bioRxiv preprint