Fetal Head Circumference Measurement from Ultrasound Images Using Attention U-Net

Abstract

Ultrasound imaging is a non-invasive approach for diagnosing internal organs that is both safe and effective. Fetal biometric measurement is a routine examination performed during pregnancy to evaluate fetal growth and estimate gestational age and weight using ultrasound images. The prenatal diagnosis of fetus helps to identify whether the growth of fetus is normal or abnormal. There are many biometric measurements like femur length, head circumference (HC), biparietal diameter(BPD), abdominal circumference etc. In this work, Head circumference (HC) measurement is performed. Head circumference (HC) is measured as a critical biometric to assess fetus growth throughout the pregnancy. Ultrasound scans are used to perform this measurement. The dataset used here is HC18 grand challenge. U-Net and Attention U-Net are used for segmenting the fetal head portion. The trained model undergoes Morphological processing and edge detection, then the head portion are fitted to the ellipse and the circumference is measured. The metrics used are Mean square error, E-Score, Accuracy and IoU score to evaluate the result.