Feasibility Study and Predictive Value of the Uterine Cervix Polarimetric Imaging for the Management of the Threat of Premature Delivery.

Prematurity is the first cause of perinatal mortality and morbidity worldwide. The threat of premature delivery (TPD), the most important complication and the leading cause of hospitalization during pregnancy has multiple origins which are seldom precisely identified. The standard medical examination for the detection of patients with TPD is the endovaginal ultrasonographic examination of uterine cervix (echography). Gynaecologists focus on the use of a new low-cost diagnostic tool based on optical imaging technologies with polarized light. The polarization is the spatio-temporal orientation of a wave's electric field. This light property, invisible with the naked eye, is sensitive to the morphological transformations of a tissue and the orientation of collagen fibers. Such tool would not require an extensive training and should provide an objective quantitative result with a sensitivity and specificity greater than conventional ultrasonography. This would be a considerable contribution to the health care of TPD, a real societal problem in Belgium, Europe and all over the world. The POLARMAP project proposes the possibility to observe in vivo and during pregnancy, the structural evolution, the density and the orientation changes of collagen fibers. A relevant scoring of collagen status might provide an alternative, and potentially objective and accurate quantifier of the time left before delivery.