Towards Unsupervised Ultrasound Video Clinical Quality Assessment with Multi-modality Data

Abstract

Video quality assurance is an important topic in obstetric ultrasound imaging to ensure that captured videos are suitable for biometry and fetal health assessment. Previously, one successful objective approach to automated ultrasound image quality assurance has considered it as a supervised learning task of detecting anatomical structures defined by a clinical protocol. In this paper, we propose an alternative and purely data-driven approach that makes effective use of both spatial and temporal information and the model learns from high-quality videos without any anatomy-specific annotations. This makes it attractive for potentially scalable generalisation. In the proposed model, a 3D encoder and decoder pair bi-directionally learns a spatio-temporal representation between the video space and the feature space. A zoom-in module is introduced to encourage the model to focus on the main object in a frame. A further design novelty is the introduction of two additional modalities in model training (sonographer gaze and optical flow derived from the video). Finally, our approach is applied to identify high-quality videos for fetal head circumference measurement in freehand second-trimester ultrasound scans. Extensive experiments are conducted, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with an AUC of 0.911.