Background and objectives: Fetal head-circumference (HC) measurement from ultrasound (US) images provides useful hints for assessing fetal growth. Such measurement is performed manually during the actual clinical practice, posing issues relevant to intra- and inter-clinician variability. This work presents a fully automatic, deep-learning-based approach to HC delineation, which we named Mask-R2CNN. It advances our previous work in the field and performs HC distance-field regression in an end-to-end fashion, without requiring a priori HC localization nor any postprocessing for outlier removal. Methods: Mask-R2CNN follows the Mask-RCNN architecture, with a backbone inspired by feature-pyramid networks, a region-proposal network and the ROI align. The Mask-RCNN segmentation head is here modified to regress the HC distance field. Results: Mask-R2CNN was tested on the HC18 Challenge dataset, which consists of 999 training and 335 testing images. With a comprehensive ablation study, we showed that Mask-R2CNN achieved a mean absolute difference of 1.95 mm (standard deviation = ± 1.92 mm), outperforming other approaches in the literature. Conclusions: With this work, we proposed an end-to-end model for HC distance-field regression. With our experimental results, we showed that Mask-R2CNN may be an effective support for clinicians for assessing fetal growth.

Mask-R 2 CNN: a distance-field regression version of Mask-RCNN for fetal-head delineation in ultrasound images / Moccia, S.; Fiorentino, M. C.; Frontoni, E.. - In: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMPUTER ASSISTED RADIOLOGY AND SURGERY. - ISSN 1861-6410. - 16:10(2021), pp. 1711-1718. [10.1007/s11548-021-02430-0]

Mask-R 2 CNN: a distance-field regression version of Mask-RCNN for fetal-head delineation in ultrasound images

Moccia S.
Primo
;
Fiorentino M. C.
Secondo
;
Frontoni E.
Ultimo
2021-01-01

Abstract

Background and objectives: Fetal head-circumference (HC) measurement from ultrasound (US) images provides useful hints for assessing fetal growth. Such measurement is performed manually during the actual clinical practice, posing issues relevant to intra- and inter-clinician variability. This work presents a fully automatic, deep-learning-based approach to HC delineation, which we named Mask-R2CNN. It advances our previous work in the field and performs HC distance-field regression in an end-to-end fashion, without requiring a priori HC localization nor any postprocessing for outlier removal. Methods: Mask-R2CNN follows the Mask-RCNN architecture, with a backbone inspired by feature-pyramid networks, a region-proposal network and the ROI align. The Mask-RCNN segmentation head is here modified to regress the HC distance field. Results: Mask-R2CNN was tested on the HC18 Challenge dataset, which consists of 999 training and 335 testing images. With a comprehensive ablation study, we showed that Mask-R2CNN achieved a mean absolute difference of 1.95 mm (standard deviation = ± 1.92 mm), outperforming other approaches in the literature. Conclusions: With this work, we proposed an end-to-end model for HC distance-field regression. With our experimental results, we showed that Mask-R2CNN may be an effective support for clinicians for assessing fetal growth.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11566/294106
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