A wide range of clinical techniques and investigations is available to healthcare professionals to survey the condition of a fetus in the womb. These may be deployed from early pregnancy to birth. They range from the use of traditional equipment such as a Pinard's stethoscope, which allows direct auscultation of the fetal heartbeat, to ultrasound imaging of the fetus, which gives an ever-increasing amount of morphological and functional data about the unborn child.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original article at https://patient.info/doctor/obstetrics/intrapartum-fetal-monitoring