Figure 2 (Illustration 2)
Schematic illustration of IA of FHR with late deceleration: Care is required not to mistake the recovering late deceleration for an acceleration.6 Hence it is safer to start auscultation in the later part of contraction. Actually counting fetal heart tones over 1 minute with a Pinard stethoscope or Doppler-device1,2 will give a figure of about 140 bpm not representative of the true baseline, with a significant risk of missing detection of the late deceleration and inability to easily and flexibly extend the auscultation duration.