Detection and Measurement of Fetal Abdominal Contour in Ultrasound Images via Local Phase Information and Iterative Randomized Hough Transform
Issue title: Frontiers in Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology – Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, 11–13 October 2013, Wuhan, China
Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. E-mail: {wangwm, lzhu, ypchui, pheng}@cse.cuhk.edu.hk | Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. E-mail: jing.qin@siat.ac.cn | National-Regional Key Technology Engineering Laboratory for Medical Ultrasound, School of Medicine, Shenzhen University, Nanhai Avenue 3688, Shenzhen, Guangdong, P.R.China, 518060. E-mail: nidong@szu.edu.cn
Abstract: Due to the characteristic artifacts of ultrasound images, e.g., speckle noise, shadows and intensity inhomogeneity, traditional intensity-based methods usually have limited success on the segmentation of fetal abdominal contour. This paper presents a novel approach to detect and measure the abdominal contour from fetal ultrasound images in two steps. First, a local phase-based measure called multiscale feature asymmetry (MSFA) is de ned from the monogenic signal to detect the boundaries of fetal abdomen. The MSFA measure is intensity invariant and provides an absolute measurement for the signi cance of features in the image. Second, in order to detect the ellipse that ts to the abdominal contour, the iterative randomized Hough transform is employed to exclude the interferences of the inner boundaries, after which the detected ellipse gradually converges to the outer boundaries of the abdomen. Experimental results in clinical ultrasound images demonstrate the high agreement between our approach and manual approach on the measurement of abdominal circumference (mean sign difference is 0.42% and correlation coef cient is 0.9973), which indicates that the proposed approach can be used as a reliable and accurate tool for obstetrical care and diagnosis.
