You can view the jupyter book here: https://birth-outcomes.github.io/birth_outcomes_summary/
We are designing a research project focussed around the prevention of adverse outcomes during labour. I developed this book to further our understanding around this topic and help guide design of the project. In particular, it is to help guide our thinking around the following...
- Issue 1: Outcome choice and measurement. Which adverse neonatal outcomes should we focus on? If we focus on hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy, how do we measure it? If we anticipate there being too few cases, what then should we focus on?
- Issue 2: Accounting for treatment use when identifying risk factors. There are prognostic factors that are associated with an increased risk of adverse outcomes but also trigger an effective intervention (caesarean section), creating a treatment paradox. This biases observed relationships between risk factors and the outcome - so it is very important that study design accounts for this
- Issue 3: Intervention effectiveness. If we want to assess the effectiveness of an intervention, it requires that we use causal inference methodologies. These are introduced and explored in this book.
There is a further issue - how we process and use cardiotocograph data - but that is explored further in seperate repositories here and here.