A Deep Convolutional Neural Network based Hybrid Framework for Fetal
Head Standard Plane Identification
Abstract
As considered to be less risky, less expensive, and more convenient than
radiological examinations, ultrasound has been routinely employed in
prenatal exams for the past decades. However, the quality of acquired
ultrasound samples, i.e., ultrasound images or videos, and the further
diagnosis is crucially depended on the sonographer. At the meantime,
there are an extremely limited number of experienced sonographer
available for the fetal ultrasound screening. Therefore, to reduce the
workload of sonographers, and to promote the quality of fetal ultrasound
screening, a deep convolutional neural network based framework is
proposed for automatically differentiating five types of fetal head
ultrasound standard planes, i.e., Transventricular plane (TV),
Transthalamic plane (TT), Transcerebellar plane (TC), Coronal view of
eyes (Eyes), Coronal view of nose (Nose), and other non-standard fetal
head ultrasound images (Background). A dataset consists of 19928 fetal
ultrasound images is applied for the model training and performance
evaluation. By combining object detection network, object classification
network, and model stacking technique, the proposed framework achieves
the state-of-the-art performance with the average accuracy of 89.61%
and the average F-1 score of 89.61%.