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Automatic Monodimensional EHG Contractions
        
        Until recently,  many studies have  been  achieved  for  the  sake  of  automatically  segmentation  of  the 
Electrohysterogram (EHG) in order to identify the efficient uterine contractions but the most of them encountered the presence 
of  other events  such  as  motion  artifacts  and  other  kind of  contractions despite  of  the use  of  efficient filtering methods. In  this 
study, we apply an online method which is developed previously and known by Dynamic Cumulative Sum (DCS) on monopolar 
EHG signals acquired through a 4x4 electrodes matrix with and without Canonical Correlation Analysis and Empirical Mode 
Decomposition (CCA-EMD) denoising method,  then  on monopolar  EHG  after  wavelet  decomposition.  The detected  segments 
are driven  through  an  automatic  concatenation technique of  detected event time from  all  channels in  order  to  reduce  the 
unwanted  segments,  the  obtained  segments  then  undergo to  implemented  Margin  validation  test  in  order  to  classify  among 
them. Sensitivity of  detected  contractions and  other detected events rate  referring to  identified  contractions  by  expert have 
been  calculated  in  order  to  track  the  efficiency  of the  fully automated multichannel  segmentation  method.  Additional EHG 
filtering  techniques like  CCA-EMD method seems  to  be  better but effective  time  cost.  Further studies  should  be  achieved  in 
order to decreasing the other events rate for the sake of fully identifying the uterine contractions.    
            [1] Alamedine D., Diab A., Muszynski C., Karlsson B., Khalil M., and Marque C., “Selection Algorithm for Parameters to Characterize Uterine EHG Signals for the Detection of Preterm Labor,” Signal Image Video Process, vol. 8, no. 6, pp. 1169-1178, 2014.
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[7] Diab A., “Study of The Nonlinear Properties And Propagation Characteristics of The Uterine Electrical Activity During Pregnancy And Labor,” Phd Thesis, University of technology of Compiegne and Reykjavik University, 2014.
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[9] Hassan M., Boudaoud S., Terrien J., Karlsson B., and Marque C., “Combination of Canonical Correlation Analysis and Empirical Mode Decomposition Applied to Denoising the Labor Electrohysterogram,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 58, no. 9, pp. 2441-2247, 2011.
[10] Karlsson B., Terrien J., Gudmundsson V., Steingrimsdottir T., and Marque C., “Abdominal EHG on a 4 By 4 Grid: Mapping and Presenting the Propagation of Uterine Contractions,” in Proceedings of the 11th Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing, Ljubljana, pp.139-143, 2007.
[11] Khalil M. and Duchêne J., “Uterine EMG Analyzing: A Dynamic Approach for Change Detection and Classification,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 46, no. 6, pp. 748-756, 2000.
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[14] Muszynski C., Happillon T., Azudin K., Tylcz J., Istrate D., and Marque C., “Automated Electrohysterographic Detection of Uterine Contractions for Monitoring of Pregnancy: Feasibility and Prospects,” BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 136, 2018.
[15] Zaylaa A., Diab A., Khalil M., and Marque C., “Multichannel EHG Segmentation for automatically identifying contractions and motion artifacts,” in Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Advances in Biomedical Engineering, Lebanon, Beirut, pp. 1-4, 2017. Catherine Marque is presently Professor at Compiègne University, Compiègne, France, in the UMR 7338 Biomechanics and Bioengineering (BMBI) lab. After a graduation in mechanical engineering from ENSAM (Paris, France), and a Master degree in Biomedical Engineering from the EcolePolytechnique de Montréal (Canada), she received the Ph.D. degree and the “Habilitation à diriger des recherches” (HDR) from Compiègne University. Her research focuses on biomedical signal processing and modeling. She is interested in the study of uterine contractility, by processing the uterine electrical activity recorded on the mother’s abdomen (electrohysterogram, EHG) in order to detect preterm labor. Since she integrated the BMBI research lab, she has been developing an international team that works on processing and modeling the EHG. Her aim is to understand the links existing between EHG characteristics and the physiological phenomena controlling uterine contraction efficiency (cell excitability, uterine synchronization) for clinical diagnosis purpose. She has recently developed a multi-scale electrical (cell, tissue, organ, abdomen) Automatic Monodimensional EHG Contractions’ Segmentation 615 and multi-physics (electrical, mechanical) model that permits to link EHG characteristics to the uterine muscle behavior (channel dynamics, electrical diffusion, sensitivity to stretching, mechano- transduction), as well as specific processing tools to investigate the EHG connectivity. These recent results permit to evidence that the uterine synchronization is the consequence not only from a simple electrical diffusion process, but also from an electromechanical coupling related to tissue stretching, a new hypothesis recently presented by physiologists. She has been coordinator of many national and international research projects that permitted her to develop various collaborations and to supervise 22 PhD and about 30 Masters thesis. She has taken the responsibility for administrative tasks, related either to teaching (engineer, Master, Doctoral education) or to research management (research unit, Regional research group…). Mohamad Khalil is currently professor, teacher and researcher at Lebanese University, faculty of engineering. He received the DEA in biomedical engineering from the University of Technology of Compiegne (UTC) in France in 1996. He received his Ph.D from the University of Technology of Troyes in France in 1999. He received his HDR (Habilitation adiriger des recherches) from UTC in 2006... He is the chair of the EMBS chapter in Lebanon, chair of ICABME international Conference. His current interests are the signal and image processing problems: detection, classification, analysis, representation and modeling of non stationary signals, with application to biomedical signals and images. Ahmad Diab received the degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Islamic University of Lebanon, Khaldeh, Lebanon, in 2010. And the M.Sc. degree in Medical and Industrial Processing and System from the Lebanese University, Tripoli, Lebanon, in 2011. Also he received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Technology of Compiègne, Compiègne, France and Reykjavik University, Reykjavik, Iceland in 2014. He was a Research Engineer at Azm center for research in biotechnology and its application, Lebanese University between 2014 and 2017. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Lebanese University and many private universities. His current research interests include signal processing problems: characterization, classification, nonlinear analysis, source localization, with application to biomedical signals. Amer Zaylaa received the degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Islamic University of Lebanon, Khaldeh, Lebanon, in 2008, the Master of research degree in Medical and Industrial Processing and System from the Lebanese University, Tripoli, Lebanon, in 2015. He is currently a PhD candidate in final year at University of Technology of Compiègne, section: Biomechanics and Bioengineering. He is currently the chair of biomedical engineering department at koura hospital since January 2009.
