Automatic quality assessment for 2D fetal sonographic standard plane based on multi-task learning
This addresses the need for efficient quality control in medical imaging for sonographers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing multi-task learning and CNN methods.
The authors tackled the problem of labor-intensive quality control in fetal sonographic images by proposing an automatic assessment scheme based on multi-task learning, achieving competitive performance in detection and classification within less than a second.
The quality control of fetal sonographic (FS) images is essential for the correct biometric measurements and fetal anomaly diagnosis. However, quality control requires professional sonographers to perform and is often labor-intensive. To solve this problem, we propose an automatic image quality assessment scheme based on multi-task learning to assist in FS image quality control. An essential criterion for FS image quality control is that all the essential anatomical structures in the section should appear full and remarkable with a clear boundary. Therefore, our scheme aims to identify those essential anatomical structures to judge whether an FS image is the standard image, which is achieved by three convolutional neural networks. The Feature Extraction Network aims to extract deep level features of FS images. Based on the extracted features, the Class Prediction Network determines whether the structure meets the standard and Region Proposal Network identifies its position. The scheme has been applied to three types of fetal sections, which are the head, abdominal, and heart. The experimental results show that our method can make a quality assessment of an FS image within less a second. Also, our method achieves competitive performance in both the detection and classification compared with state-of-the-art methods.