Washington (AP) - Obstetricians are about to get the first fetal monitor to measure the oxygen level inside an unborn baby’s blood during labor. This breakthrough device promises to help doctors determine which babies really are in distress and may need to be delivered by Cesarean section. The Food and Drug Administration approved the OxiFirst system recently, calling it the first major technological development in fetal monitoring in some 30 years. Doctors have long used devices called pulse oximeters that measure oxygen saturation in the blood of children and adults. But the proper oxygen level of a fetus was something of a mystery, and there have been no devices that could try to measure it.
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