Automated fetal lateral ventricular width estimation from prenatal
ultrasound based on deep learning algorithms
Abstract
Ventriculomegaly (VM) is the medical term used to describe enlargement
of the lateral ventricles to a level of 10 mm or more, which is the most
frequent sign of possible CNS abnormality detected on prenatal
ultrasound. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the feasibility of
CNN-based DL algorithms predicting the fetal lateral ventricular width
from prenatal ultrasound images. The data was collected from 626
pregnant women with gestational age between 22 to 26 weeks. 3456 brain
images were picked out from all 49222 stored freeze-frame images. 2304
transventricular (TV) or transthalamic (TT) plane images were further
picked out and the brain regions were detected and extracted. 1431 TV-TT
planes had known lateral ventricular width. The mean absolute error
(MAE) of the predicted lateral ventricular width was 1.01 mm. More than
65% test images had a MAE of less than 1 mm. If we used only the 610
cases with lateral ventricular width less than 15 mm to train and test
the model, the MAE was 0.54 mm and more than 82% test images had a MAE
of less than 1 mm. We also implemented heat maps to provide evidence
that our regression model predicting the lateral ventricular width was
based on the anatomical structure of lateral ventricular. The results
shown that the regression model can locate the lateral ventricular
region of images with large lateral ventricular width successfully and
then predict its width based on this region.