Giving birth to a child is one of the most miraculous things that can happen in a woman's life. Delivering a child, and sometimes children, is also one the most anticipated events in the lives of couples, especially those who are moms-to-be. However, dangers in child delivery can turn what should be a dream come true into a nightmare.

Thanks to a newly developed computer software combined with magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, of a fetus, physicians now have better means of assessing the potential difficulties in a woman's childbirth - a development that can help women plan on how they will deliver their child.

Olivier Ami, MD, PhD, an obstetrician in the Department of Radiology at Antoine Beclere's Hospital, Universte Paris Sud, France, explained that a woman's birth canal is curved and is not much wider than a fetus' head. Through this birth canal, a baby must move in a specific sequence of maneuvers in order for a delivery to be safe.

This is where the new software comes in. The software, called PREDIBIRTH, was created using processed MR images of 24 pregnant women. These images created a 3-D reconstruction of both the pelvis and the fetus along with 72 possible trajectories of the baby's head through the birth canal.

What the program does is it scores each mother's likelihood of a normal birth, enabling advance planning, instead of having to go under an emergency procedure on the delivery room itself.

In their tests, Dr. Ami noted that the results in predicting dystocia, or difficult labor, were highly accurate and that it is a significant improvement over the conventional way of assessing the adequacy of childbirth called pelvimetry.

The doctor cited the dangers of a C-section which has six to seven times more morbidity and mortality than a plan C-section, and said that with the use of this new virtual childbirth software, difficult instrumental extraction might disappear in the near future.

Further elaborating the many situations babies can get themselves into, the normal way of delivering a child would be when the baby's head is leading the way through the cervix and into the birth canal, according to WebMD.com. However, different scenarios might occur, some of these scenarios are:

1. Frank breech - wherein the baby's buttocks lead the way into the pelvis; the hips are flexed, and the knee extended

2. Complete breech - where both knees and hips are flexed, and the baby's buttocks or feet may enter the birth canal first

3. Incomplete breech - one or both feet lead the way

4. Transverse lie - the baby's shoulders will lead the way into the birth canal rather than the head