133 research outputs found
Improving Fetal Head Contour Detection by Object Localisation with Deep Learning
Ultrasound-based fetal head biometrics measurement is a key indicator in monitoring the conditions of fetuses. Since manual measurement of relevant anatomical structures of fetal head is time-consuming and subject to inter-observer variability, there has been strong interest in finding automated, robust, accurate and reliable method. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based method to segment fetal head from ultrasound images. The proposed method formulates the detection of fetal head boundary as a combined object localisation and segmentation problem based on deep learning model. Incorporating an object localisation in a framework developed for segmentation purpose aims to improve the segmentation accuracy achieved by fully convolutional network. Finally, ellipse is fitted on the contour of the segmented fetal head using least-squares ellipse fitting method. The proposed model is trained on 999 2-dimensional ultrasound images and tested on 335 images achieving Dice coefficient of. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed deep learning method is promising in automatic fetal head detection and segmentation
Confident head circumference measurement from ultrasound with real-time feedback for sonographers
Manual estimation of fetal Head Circumference (HC) from Ultrasound (US) is a key biometric for monitoring the healthy development of fetuses. Unfortunately, such measurements are subject to large inter-observer variability, resulting in low early-detection rates of fetal abnormalities. To address this issue, we propose a novel probabilistic Deep Learning approach for real-time automated estimation of fetal HC. This system feeds back statistics on measurement robustness to inform users how confident a deep neural network is in evaluating suitable views acquired during free-hand ultrasound examination. In real-time scenarios, this approach may be exploited to guide operators to scan planes that are as close as possible to the underlying distribution of training images, for the purpose of improving inter-operator consistency. We train on freehand ultrasound data from over 2000 subjects (2848 training/540 test) and show that our method is able to predict HC measurements within 1.81±1.65 mm deviation from the ground truth, with 50% of the test images fully contained within the predicted confidence margins, and an average of 1.82±1.78 mm deviation from the margin for the remaining cases that are not fully contained
A regression framework to head-circumference delineation from US fetal images
Background and Objectives: Measuring head-circumference (HC) length from ultrasound (US) images is a crucial clinical task to assess fetus growth. To lower intra- and inter-operator variability in HC length measuring, several computer-assisted solutions have been proposed in the years. Recently, a large number of deep-learning approaches is addressing the problem of HC delineation through the segmentation of the whole fetal head via convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Since the task is a edge-delineation problem, we propose a different strategy based on regression CNNs. Methods: The proposed framework consists of a region-proposal CNN for head localization and centering, and a regression CNN for accurately delineate the HC. The first CNN is trained exploiting transfer learning, while we propose a training strategy for the regression CNN based on distance fields. Results: The framework was tested on the HC18 Challenge dataset, which consists of 999 training and 335 testing images. A mean absolute difference of 1.90 ( ± 1.76) mm and a Dice similarity coefficient of 97.75 ( ± 1.32) % were achieved, overcoming approaches in the literature. Conclusions: The experimental results showed the effectiveness of the proposed framework, proving its potential in supporting clinicians during the clinical practice
Detecting hypo-plastic left heart syndrome in fetal ultrasound via disease-specific atlas maps
Fetal ultrasound screening during pregnancy plays a vital role in the early detection of fetal malformations which have potential long-term health impacts. The level of skill required to diagnose such malformations from live ultrasound during examination is high and resources for screening are often limited. We present an interpretable, atlas-learning segmentation method for automatic diagnosis of Hypo-plastic Left Heart Syndrome (HLHS) from a single ‘4 Chamber Heart’ view image. We propose to extend the recently introduced Image-and-Spatial Transformer Networks (Atlas-ISTN) into a framework that enables sensitising atlas generation to disease. In this framework we can jointly learn image segmentation, registration, atlas construction and disease prediction while providing a maximum level of clinical interpretability compared to direct image classification methods. As a result our segmentation allows diagnoses competitive with expert-derived manual diagnosis and yields an AUC-ROC of 0.978 (1043 cases for training, 260 for validation and 325 for testing)
FetalNet: Multi-task Deep Learning Framework for Fetal Ultrasound Biometric Measurements
In this paper, we propose an end-to-end multi-task neural network called
FetalNet with an attention mechanism and stacked module for spatio-temporal
fetal ultrasound scan video analysis. Fetal biometric measurement is a standard
examination during pregnancy used for the fetus growth monitoring and
estimation of gestational age and fetal weight. The main goal in fetal
ultrasound scan video analysis is to find proper standard planes to measure the
fetal head, abdomen and femur. Due to natural high speckle noise and shadows in
ultrasound data, medical expertise and sonographic experience are required to
find the appropriate acquisition plane and perform accurate measurements of the
fetus. In addition, existing computer-aided methods for fetal US biometric
measurement address only one single image frame without considering temporal
features. To address these shortcomings, we propose an end-to-end multi-task
neural network for spatio-temporal ultrasound scan video analysis to
simultaneously localize, classify and measure the fetal body parts. We propose
a new encoder-decoder segmentation architecture that incorporates a
classification branch. Additionally, we employ an attention mechanism with a
stacked module to learn salient maps to suppress irrelevant US regions and
efficient scan plane localization. We trained on the fetal ultrasound video
comes from routine examinations of 700 different patients. Our method called
FetalNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both classification
and segmentation in fetal ultrasound video recordings.Comment: Accepted to 28th International Conference on Neural Information
Processing (ICONIP) 2021, Bali, Indonesia, 8-12 December, 202
Machine Learning in Fetal Cardiology: What to Expect
In fetal cardiology, imaging (especially echocardiography) has demonstrated to help in the diagnosis and monitoring of fetuses with a compromised cardiovascular system potentially associated with several fetal conditions. Different ultrasound approaches are currently used to evaluate fetal cardiac structure and function, including conventional 2-D imaging and M-mode and tissue Doppler imaging among others. However, assessment of the fetal heart is still challenging mainly due to involuntary movements of the fetus, the small size of the heart, and the lack of expertise in fetal echocardiography of some sonographers. Therefore, the use of new technologies to improve the primary acquired images, to help extract measurements, or to aid in the diagnosis of cardiac abnormalities is of great importance for optimal assessment of the fetal heart. Machine leaning (ML) is a computer science discipline focused on teaching a computer to perform tasks with specific goals without explicitly programming the rules on how to perform this task. In this review we provide a brief overview on the potential of ML techniques to improve the evaluation of fetal cardiac function by optimizing image acquisition and quantification/segmentation, as well as aid in improving the prenatal diagnoses of fetal cardiac remodeling and abnormalities
Symbiotic deep learning for medical image analysis with applications in real-time diagnosis for fetal ultrasound screening
The last hundred years have seen a monumental rise in the power and capability of machines to
perform intelligent tasks in the stead of previously human operators. This rise is not expected
to slow down any time soon and what this means for society and humanity as a whole remains
to be seen. The overwhelming notion is that with the right goals in mind, the growing influence
of machines on our every day tasks will enable humanity to give more attention to the truly
groundbreaking challenges that we all face together. This will usher in a new age of human
machine collaboration in which humans and machines may work side by side to achieve greater
heights for all of humanity. Intelligent systems are useful in isolation, but the true benefits of
intelligent systems come to the fore in complex systems where the interaction between humans
and machines can be made seamless, and it is this goal of symbiosis between human and machine
that may democratise complex knowledge, which motivates this thesis. In the recent past, datadriven
methods have come to the fore and now represent the state-of-the-art in many different
fields. Alongside the shift from rule-based towards data-driven methods we have also seen a
shift in how humans interact with these technologies. Human computer interaction is changing
in response to data-driven methods and new techniques must be developed to enable the same
symbiosis between man and machine for data-driven methods as for previous formula-driven
technology.
We address five key challenges which need to be overcome for data-driven human-in-the-loop
computing to reach maturity. These are (1) the ’Categorisation Challenge’ where we examine
existing work and form a taxonomy of the different methods being utilised for data-driven
human-in-the-loop computing; (2) the ’Confidence Challenge’, where data-driven methods must
communicate interpretable beliefs in how confident their predictions are; (3) the ’Complexity
Challenge’ where the aim of reasoned communication becomes increasingly important as the
complexity of tasks and methods to solve also increases; (4) the ’Classification Challenge’ in
which we look at how complex methods can be separated in order to provide greater reasoning
in complex classification tasks; and finally (5) the ’Curation Challenge’ where we challenge the
assumptions around bottleneck creation for the development of supervised learning methods.Open Acces
Automatic segmentation method of pelvic floor levator hiatus in ultrasound using a self-normalising neural network
Segmentation of the levator hiatus in ultrasound allows to extract biometrics
which are of importance for pelvic floor disorder assessment. In this work, we
present a fully automatic method using a convolutional neural network (CNN) to
outline the levator hiatus in a 2D image extracted from a 3D ultrasound volume.
In particular, our method uses a recently developed scaled exponential linear
unit (SELU) as a nonlinear self-normalising activation function, which for the
first time has been applied in medical imaging with CNN. SELU has important
advantages such as being parameter-free and mini-batch independent, which may
help to overcome memory constraints during training. A dataset with 91 images
from 35 patients during Valsalva, contraction and rest, all labelled by three
operators, is used for training and evaluation in a leave-one-patient-out
cross-validation. Results show a median Dice similarity coefficient of 0.90
with an interquartile range of 0.08, with equivalent performance to the three
operators (with a Williams' index of 1.03), and outperforming a U-Net
architecture without the need for batch normalisation. We conclude that the
proposed fully automatic method achieved equivalent accuracy in segmenting the
pelvic floor levator hiatus compared to a previous semi-automatic approach
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