Structure-Augmented Standard Plane Detection with Temporal Aggregation in Blind-Sweep Fetal Ultrasound

TL;DR

This paper introduces a structure-augmented, temporally aggregated method for detecting fetal abdomen planes in blind-sweep ultrasound, improving stability and reliability in low-resource settings.

Contribution

It proposes a novel structure-augmented detection system combined with temporal aggregation to enhance plane detection accuracy in blind-sweep ultrasound.

Findings

Significant improvement in detection stability and accuracy.

Enhanced reliability of biometric measurements.

Effective stabilization of keyframe localization.

Abstract

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.