Advancing Newborn Care: Precise Birth Time Detection Using AI-Driven Thermal Imaging with Adaptive Normalization

Around 5-10\% of newborns need assistance to start breathing. Currently, there is a lack of evidence-based research, objective data collection, and opportunities for learning from real newborn resuscitation emergency events. Generating and evaluating automated newborn resuscitation algorithm activity timelines relative to the Time of Birth (ToB) offers a promising opportunity to enhance newborn care practices. Given the importance of prompt resuscitation interventions within the "golden minute" after birth, having an accurate ToB with second precision is essential for effective subsequent analysis of newborn resuscitation episodes. Instead, ToB is generally registered manually, often with minute precision, making the process inefficient and susceptible to error and imprecision. In this work, we explore the fusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and thermal imaging to develop the first AI-driven ToB detector. The use of temperature information offers a promising alternative to detect the newborn while respecting the privacy of healthcare providers and mothers. However, the frequent inconsistencies in thermal measurements, especially in a multi-camera setup, make normalization strategies critical. Our methodology involves a three-step process: first, we propose an adaptive normalization method based on Gaussian mixture models (GMM) to mitigate issues related to temperature variations; second, we implement and deploy an AI model to detect the presence of the newborn within the thermal video frames; and third, we evaluate and post-process the model's predictions to estimate the ToB. A precision of 88.1\% and a recall of 89.3\% are reported in the detection of the newborn within thermal frames during performance evaluation. Our approach achieves an absolute median deviation of 2.7 seconds in estimating the ToB relative to the manual annotations.