Automatic Measurement of Fetal Abdominal Biometric Parameters—Feasibility on a Portable Ultrasound Device

Abstract

An automatic method for measuring the fetal mean abdominal diameter (MAD) or abdominal circumference (AC) with ultrasound is proposed. From a correctly presented abdominal section suitable for MAD or AC measurement, the location of fetal abdomen is detected by image processing. Thereafter, an active contour model is converged along the abdominal boundary for measurement purposes. The validation data set contained 310 images of fetuses with gestational age (GA) from 14 to 41 weeks. The measurement success rate was 88.1%. By manually indicating the location of the abdomen, the success rate was further improved to 95.8% for the failed cases. The correlation between manual and automatic measurements was 0.95 and the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was 0.976 (95% confidence interval (CI); 0.969 -0.981). The average method execution time was 0.3 s. The mean error was lower in young fetuses (0.4%) than in older fetuses (−2.1%). The proposed cross-platform method was implemented on a portable, low-cost ultrasound machine prototype targeted for low-and middle-income countries (LMIC); the results achieved were comparable to those of other state-of-the-art automatic methods.