Robust Mid-Sagittal Plane Extraction in 3-D Ultrasound Fetal Volume for First Trimester Screening

摘要

Extraction of the mid-sagittal plane (MSP) in 3-D ultrasound fetal volume is an important procedure for first trimester screening. We present a robust semi-automated MSP extraction method for 3-D ultrasound fetal volume based on parametric template matching of an ellipse to the skull edge and on the combination of the local similarity measure and adaptive support-weight map. The algorithm is intended to reduce the variability of manual MSP detection. Our semi-automatically extracted MSPs are compared to those extracted manually by experts and experimental results demonstrate that our method is robust even in the presence of asymmetry, outlier and speckle noise with excellent detection accuracy for a large set of fetal volume data.