A research collaboration led by two UNSW Sydney academics has been awarded up to $A2.4 million from a US government agency to develop a fetal monitoring system that could transform labour and delivery.
Professor Alec Welsh, from the UNSW School of Clinical Medicine and practising Obstetrician and Maternal-Fetal Medicine subspecialist at the Royal Hospital for Women, and Professor Tracie Barber, from the UNSW School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, are the only team outside the US to be included in the Making Obstetrics Care Smart (MOCS) program.
MOCS is a four-year $US90.7 million program from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), part of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The funding will enable the decade-long UNSW partnership to expand on its successful $A5.4 million Wellcome Leap In Utero Program, which established new approaches for measuring fetal and placental blood flow during pregnancy.
Professor Welsh said the tools used during labour to monitor fetal distress or lack of oxygen to the fetus are limited and out of date.
“For the first time, our research and our technology allows us to look at blood flow within the baby or within the placenta,” Prof Welsh said.
“And there hasn’t been any tool that could do that before. Currently we look at a squiggly heartbeat tracing and then try to interpret that squiggle to work out whether it means the baby is okay or not and it’s the one thing that has been relied upon for decades.
“It has poor predictive value and so we want to actually see how blood flows within the placenta change when the uterus contracts.”
Prof Barber said the multidisciplinary team will develop a system that combines wearable ultrasound technology, artificial intelligence and cloud-based image analysis to provide quantitative monitoring of blood circulation in the placenta.
“By integrating advanced engineering methods with clinical data, we aim to improve the early detection of fetal hypoxia – a lack of oxygen – and support more timely clinical decision-making,” she said.
The collaboration has been successful, she said, because both the clinicians and the engineers work together at the Royal Hospital for Women.
“You have lots of engineering groups coming up with cool stuff in their lab but when they take it to the hospital, the clinical people say they can’t use it.”
“Then you have clinical people who have a problem but are maybe not aware of the engineering tools that could fix it. Our group is living together in the same place at the hospital, so our engineers are working with the clinical people.”
The group includes about 20 engineering and medical students.
“There have been so many times when someone on the clinical side might say they have had to repeat the same thing for the fifth time and then one of the engineers will write them a program to automate the task. Having all those people together is why it works.”
Professor Bronwyn Fox, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research & Enterprise at UNSW, congratulated the researchers on securing funding to continue their research.
“This funding recognises the significant work being done by UNSW researchers to improve birth outcomes,” Prof Fox said.
“This ongoing collaboration between Professors Barber and Welsh is an outstanding example of two different disciplines working together on an important international program to improve healthcare for generations to come.”
Prof Barber said the new project is the next step towards translating the research into technologies that can improve outcomes for mothers and babies worldwide.
If successful, MOCS will save lives, prevent birth complications, and spare the US healthcare system an estimated $US1 billion per year in unnecessary procedures, ARPA-H said in a statement.
“Fetal heart rate monitoring is woefully insufficient,” said MOCS Program Manager Kate Arnold.
“Today, with the care team and the family doing their best, babies are still born with low oxygen, and unnecessary caesareans are frequently performed. MOCS performers will develop cutting edge sensing technology, paired with AI, to give care teams and families the real-time, actionable information they deserve.”Â
Other teams, from Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University and Wavelet Medical Inc, among others, will work on different monitoring systems.
