Application of Artificial Intelligence in Early Diagnosis of Spontaneous Preterm Labor and Birth

This study reviews the current status and future prospective of knowledge on the use of artificial intelligence for the prediction of spontaneous preterm labor and birth (“preterm birth” hereafter). The summary of review suggests that different machine learning approaches would be optimal for different types of data regarding the prediction of preterm birth: the artificial neural network, logistic regression and/or the random forest for numeric data; the support vector machine for electrohysterogram data; the recurrent neural network for text data; and the convolutional neural network for image data. The ranges of performance measures were 0.79–0.94 for accuracy, 0.22–0.97 for sensitivity, 0.86–1.00 for specificity, and 0.54–0.83 for the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. The following maternal variables were reported to be major determinants of preterm birth: delivery and pregestational body mass index, age, parity, predelivery systolic and diastolic blood pressure, twins, below high school graduation, infant sex, prior preterm birth, progesterone medication history, upper gastrointestinal tract symptom, gastroesophageal reflux disease, Helicobacter pylori, urban region, calcium channel blocker medication history, gestational diabetes mellitus, prior cone biopsy, cervical length, myomas and adenomyosis, insurance, marriage, religion, systemic lupus erythematosus, hydroxychloroquine sulfate, and increased cerebrospinal fluid and reduced cortical folding due to impaired brain growth.