Quantitative assessment system for placental gross examination with precise localization of umbilical cord insertion point.

Abstract

A quantitative assessment for measuring the placenta during gross examination is a crucial step in evaluating the health status of both the mother and the fetus. However, in the current clinical practice, time-consuming and observer-variant drawbacks are caused due to manual measurement and subjective determination of placental characteristics. Therefore, we propose a quantitative assessment system for placenta gross examination to efficiently and accurately measuring placental characteristics according to Amsterdam Consensus, including weight and thickness of placenta, length and width of placental disc, length and diameter of umbilical cord, distance from umbilical cord insertion point to placental edges, etc. The proposed system consists of (1) an instrument designed for standard acquisition of image, weight and thickness of placenta and (2) an algorithm for quantitative morphological assessment based on precise segmentation of placental disc and umbilical cord and localization of umbilical cord insertion point. Considering the complexity of spatial distribution and ambiguous texture of umbilical cord insertion point, we design Umbilical Cord Insertion Point Candidate Generator to provide reliable umbilical cord insertion point location by employing prior structural knowledge of umbilical cord. Therefore, we integrate the Umbilical Cord Insertion Point Candidate Generator with a Base Detector to ensure umbilical cord insertion point is provided when the Base Detector fails to generate high-scoring candidate points. Experimental results on our self-collected placenta dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. The measurements of placental morphological assessment are calculated based on segmentation and localization results. Our proposed quantitative assessment system, along with its associated instrument and algorithm, can automatically extract numerical measurements to boost the standardization and efficiency of placental gross examination.