Structure-Augmented Standard Plane Detection with Temporal Aggregation in Blind-Sweep Fetal Ultrasound
This work addresses fetal growth restriction detection in low-resource settings using blind-sweep ultrasound, but it is incremental as it builds on prior segmentation and temporal methods.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting fetal abdomen planes in blind-sweep ultrasound, which is challenging due to uncontrolled fetal structures and oblique planes, and resulted in a structure-augmented temporal sliding strategy that significantly improved and stabilized detection for more reliable biometric measurements.
In low-resource settings, blind-sweep ultrasound provides a practical and accessible method for identifying fetal growth restriction. However, unlike freehand ultrasound which is subjectively controlled, detection of biometry plane in blind-sweep ultrasound is more challenging due to the uncontrolled fetal structure to be observed and the variaties of oblique planes in the scan. In this work, we propose a structure-augmented system to detect fetal abdomen plane, where the abdominal structure is highlighted using a segmentation prior. Since standard planes are emerging gradually, the decision boundary of the keyframes is unstable to predict. We thus aggregated the structure-augmented planes with a temporal sliding window to help stabilise keyframe localisation. Extensive results indicate that the structure-augmented temporal sliding strategy significantly improves and stabilises the detection of anatomically meaningful planes, which enables more reliable biometric measurements in blind-sweep ultrasound.