Multi-DNBiTM: preterm labor prediction from electrohysterography signals using multi-head attention-enabled deep learning framework

The timely prediction of preterm labor plays a crucial role in improving neonatal survival, as well as in providing professional care for the infant and mother. The Electrohysterography (EHG) signals have higher sensitivity, which provides a promising avenue for analyzing preterm labor contractions. The conventional preterm labor prediction approaches are highly vulnerable to various limitations regarding higher correlations, a lack of robustness, as well as lower sensitivity to minor variations. The research proposes a multi-head attention-enabled distributed neural network with a bidirectional long short-term memory (multi-DNBiTM) framework that aims to overcome the challenges of conventional approaches by exhibiting accurate predictions. The research employs Root mean energy-entropy deep features (RMEn2D) that are beneficial in analyzing the variations of each frequency subbands, providing a higher representation of minor uterine contractions. The multi-head attention categorizes the feature maps into diverse heads, which facilitates the learning of intrinsic patterns. Moreover, multi-level training improves prediction accuracy through analyzing the signals at different levels and allows to learn fine details. The efficiency of the multi-DNBiTM model is evaluated with the prevailing approaches, which reveal better outcomes by acquiring 96.93% accuracy, 98.45% sensitivity, and 98.19% specificity.