Spectrotemporal Feature Extraction in EHG Signals and Tocograms for Enhanced Preterm Birth Prediction
Preterm birth (PTB), defined as delivery before 37 weeks of gestation, is a leading cause of neonatal mortality and long term health complications. Early detection is essential for enabling timely medical interventions. Electrohysterography (EHG) and tocography (TOCO) are promising non invasive tools for PTB prediction, but prior studies often suffer from class imbalance, improper oversampling, and reliance on features with limited physiological relevance. This work presents a machine learning (ML) pipeline incorporating robust preprocessing, physiologically grounded feature extraction, and rigorous evaluation. Features were extracted from EHG (and TOCO) signals using Mel frequency cepstral coefficients, statistical descriptors of wavelet coefficients, and peaks of the normalized power spectrum. Signal quality was enhanced via Karhunen Loeve Transform (KLT) denoising through eigenvalue based subspace decomposition. Multiple classifiers, including Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Multilayer Perceptron, and CatBoost, were evaluated on the TPEHGT dataset. The CatBoost classifier with KLT denoising achieved the highest performance on fixed interval segments of the TPEHGT dataset, reaching 97.28% accuracy and an AUC of 0.9988. Ablation studies confirmed the critical role of both KLT denoising and physiologically informed features. Comparative analysis showed that including TOCO signals did not substantially improve prediction over EHG alone, highlighting the sufficiency of EHG for PTB detection. These results demonstrate that combining denoising with domain-relevant features can yield highly accurate, robust, and clinically interpretable models, supporting the development of cost-effective and accessible PTB prediction tools, particularly in low-resource healthcare settings.