Placental monitoring study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Optical monitoring of placental oxygenation and metabolism
IRAS ID
325344
Contact name
Subhabrata Mitra
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University College London
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 11 months, 30 days
Research summary
One in every 225 pregnancies in UK ends in stillbirth, with 2 million stillbirths reported worldwide each year. 40% of stillbirths happen during labour, which can be prevented with appropriate monitoring. Continuous cardiotocography (CTG) is the current standard of monitoring for fetal assessment, but it failed to significantly reduce poor outcomes in newborn infants, and resulted in an increase in the number of caesarean sections. There is an urgent need for developing a non-invasive monitoring tool to accurately measure acute or chronic changes related to fetal compromise and can be used easily both in the hospital and home environment.
Near Infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a light-based monitoring tool that can monitor oxygen level in the tissue. It has become part of standard monitoring in many areas of clinical practice, particularly for newborn brain monitoring. We have recently developed broadband NIRS in UCL, which can also monitor how the tissue uses oxygen (metabolism).
We propose to develop and validate an optical platform with a wearable sensor (FetalSense) that can continuously monitor and integrate placental oxygenation and metabolism, fetal heart rate, and fetal movements. This will help us to identify any acute or chronic changes in gestational development and predict fetoplacental compromise leading to stillbirth, changes associated with the preterm onset of labour following placental infection and inflammation. We will correlate these findings with respective placental histopathological findings.
In the first phase, we will monitor pregnant women with normal or low-risk pregnancies at University College London Hospital (UCLH), during which we will establish normal values over different gestations. In the second phase, high-risk pregnant women will be monitored both in the hospital and the community in UCLH and AIIMS (All India Institute for Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India), aiming to establish the real-time identification of changes associated with fetal compromise.REC name
East of England - Essex Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
23/EE/0077
Date of REC Opinion
11 May 2023
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion