PREDIBIRTH: Improving the Safety of High-Risk Deliveries

Obstetrician, Olivier Ami, M.D., Ph.D. raves about new technology that allows doctors to help assess a woman’s potential for a difficult childbirth, in the recent article, “Virtual Childbirth Simulator Improves Safety of High-Risk Deliveries”. Using newly developed computer software combined with magnetic resonance images of a fetus, physicians are capable of predicting dystocia before labor. Child birth can prove to be a very dangerous and fatal process if abnormalities in the position of the child occur. Because a woman’s birth canal is curved and typically not much wider than an infant’s head, a baby must exit the birth canal in very specific sequences of movements. Any disruption in this process may result in a difficult labor. The newly developed software, PREDIBIRTH, produces a three-dimensional construction of the mother’s pelvis and the fetus. It also produces 72 different trajectories of the the baby’s head exiting the birth canal. These simulations enable the software to produce a score for each mother with their likelihood of having a normal birth.

The image above shows one of the simulations generated by PREDIBIRTH of a fetus and pelvis.

A study was performed on 24 women using PREDIBIRTH. Thirteen of the women delivered normally and theses deliveries were each scored as highly favorable by PREDIBIRTH. Three women who delivered by cesarean-section by choice had been scored at high risk of dystocia by PREDIBIRTH. Also, three women who had to have emergency C-section because of obstructed labor had been scored at a high risk. The results predicted by PREDIBIRTH were highly accurate and an improvement over the current method of pelvimetry, which merely measures the pelvis and determines its adequacy for childbirth.

This software could prove very beneficial to physicians because currently, emergency C-sections are 6-7 times more likely to result in morbidity and mortality than a planned C-section. This new method could help reduce the number of emergency C-sections and hopefully the mortality and morbidity rates during childbirth.