Sensitivity analysis of a realistic electrical model of the Uterine activity

This paper presents the sensitivity analysis (SA) of a model developed to simulate the uterine electrical activity recorded on the woman’s abdomen (the electrohysterogram, EHG). This model contains different sub-models that permit to simulate the electro-chemical behavior of the uterine muscle during a contraction (EHG), the abdominal conducting volume as well as a personalized geometry of the uterus. We based our sensitivity analysis on the Morris elementary effects method, a well-known screening method suited for large dimension and complex models. We adapted the classical Morris sensitivity measures to deal with the non-uniform distribution of the elementary effects. The SA tested the effect of the 32 parameters of the model on 5 classical features computed from the simulated EHG. The results indicate a nonlinear influence of the parameters on the EHG features. They permit to evidence the most important parameters as well of the negligible ones for the further use of the uterine model.