Babies are born everyday. It's a fact that for every minute, 267 infants are born worldwide. However, how they are delivered, is an entirely different story.

When preparing to deliver a baby, physicians look at fetal heart rate patterns to guide them in deciding whether or not to perform a C-section. But without a standard to guide physicians during those critical hours, doctors and nurses often resort to guessing.

It is this specific reason of unwarranted delivery through C-sections that Marc Jackson, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Intermountain Medical Center, considered studying fetal heart rates.

"For years we've used the fetal heart rate to try to identify problems, but it's not a very good map because we have so many babies in an 'indeterminate' category," Jackson said

To make things more certain, Jackson along with his colleagues, studied the fetal heart rate patterns from more than 48,000 labor and delivery cases at 10 Intermountain Healthcare hospitals, in a period of 28 months.

The heart rates were then classified under categories; category I had normal heart rate patterns; category II are considered indeterminate; and category III had abnormal heart rates which usually indicate a problem.

In their study, the researchers examined the time babies spend in each of these categories and neonatal outcomes. When they analyzed the data that came from all stages of labor, they discovered that 78% of the time, fetal heart rate patterns were classified to category I, 22% to category II, and only 0.004% on category III.

But when it came to the data at the final two hours of delivery, the percentages changed. Based on their findings, they found that category I rates decreased to 61%, while category II rates increased to 39%, category III rates increased only by 0.002%.

Using the Apgar system of determining a newborn's health - from 0 to 10, 10 being the highest - the researchers found that babies that spent the entire time in category I scored well. Five minutes after birth, only 0.6 percent had an Apgar score lower than seven. Only 0.2% needed to be admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit.

For category II rates, occurring in 84 percent of all labors, data showed that the amount of time spent in the category increased in two last two hours before delivery. This came with lower Apgar scored and increased admissions to the NICU.

Category III heart patterns were rare, occurring only 0.1% of the patients studied, and resulted in admission to the NICU half of the time.

Jackson noted that they plan to sort out the patterns in category II to determine which ones are more predictive of a baby that's sick and one that's healthy.

According to Childbirth Connection, a national not-for-profit organization, C-section rates in the United States during 2001 was as high as 25%, but come 2009, this percentage jumped to 32.9%.