- at some point someone, without evidence, speculated that cervix dilation should proceed along some curve
- cervix dilation is actually measured by hand - literally inserting fingers and having the doctor practice "so many fingers = so many centimeters". There's plastic sheets with holes in them so they can practice measuring the size of holes with fingers.
- the OBGYN knows that the cervix dilation curve should look like, and kinda sorta maps their hand readings to what it should look like
- the OBGYN has a general sense as to how labor is going, and will game the cervix dilation stats to match their expectation, e.g. if labor is going well but the cervix hasn't dilated then they'll kinda sorta report progress anyway
Anyway, given the above it seems like the data around cervix dilation is suspect - the measurements are fitted to what the curve should look like, and then the data matches the curve, and that makes people more confident in the curve, and so on.
The point is, can you really apply ML to the EMR of cervix dilation? Does it make sense, could you really draw conclusions from this?