Object Detection During Newborn Resuscitation Activities

Objective: Birth asphyxia is a major newborn mortality problem in low-resource countries. International guideline provides treatment recommendations; however, the importance and effect of the different treatments are not fully explored. The available data is collected in Tanzania, during newborn resuscitation, for analysis of the resuscitation activities and the response of the newborn. An important step in the analysis is to create activity timelines of the episodes, where activities include ventilation, suction, stimulation etc. Methods: The available recordings are noisy real-world videos with large variations. We propose a two-step process in order to detect activities possibly overlapping in time. The first step is to detect and track the relevant objects, like bag-mask resuscitator, heart rate sensors etc., and the second step is to use this information to recognize the resuscitation activities. The topic of this paper is the first step, and the object detection and tracking are based on convolutional neural networks followed by post processing. Results: The precision of the object detection during activities were 96.97 % (ventilations), 100 % (attaching/removing heart rate sensor) and 75 % (suction) on a test set of 20 videos. The system also estimate the number of health care providers present with a precision of 71.16 %. Conclusion: The proposed object detection and tracking system provides acceptable results in noisy newborn resuscitation videos. Significance: This is an important first step in a thorough analysis of newborn resuscitation episodes, which could provide important insight about the importance and effect of different newborn resuscitation activities.