Developing innovative informatics approaches aimed to enhance fetal monitoring is a burgeoning field of study in reproductive medicine. Several reviews have been conducted regarding Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to improve pregnancy outcomes. They are limited by focusing on specific data such as mother's care during pregnancy. This systematic survey aims to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) can assist with fetal growth monitoring via Ultrasound (US) image. We used eight medical and computer science bibliographic databases, including PubMed, Embase, PsycINFO, ScienceDirect, IEEE explore, ACM Library, Google Scholar, and the Web of Science. We retrieved studies published between 2010 to 2021. Data extracted from studies were synthesized using a narrative approach. Out of 1269 retrieved studies, we included 107 distinct studies from queries that were relevant to the topic in the survey. We found that 2D ultrasound images were more popular (n=88) than 3D and 4D ultrasound images (n=19). Classification is the most used method (n=42), followed by segmentation (n=31), classification integrated with segmentation (n=16) and other miscellaneous such as object-detection, regression and reinforcement learning (n=18). The most common areas within the pregnancy domain were the fetus head (n=43), then fetus body (n=31), fetus heart (n=13), fetus abdomen (n=10), and lastly the fetus face (n=10). In the most recent studies, deep learning techniques were primarily used (n=81), followed by machine learning (n=16), artificial neural network (n=7), and reinforcement learning (n=2). AI techniques played a crucial role in predicting fetal diseases and identifying fetus anatomy structures during pregnancy. More research is required to validate this technology from a physician's perspective, such as pilot studies and randomized controlled trials on AI and its applications in a hospital setting.
Isfahan University of Technology（伊斯法罕理工大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Ultrasound imaging is a standard examination during pregnancy that can be used for measuring specific biometric parameters towards prenatal diagnosis and estimating gestational age. Fetal head circumference (HC) is one of the significant factors to determine the fetus growth and health. In this paper, a multi-task deep convolutional neural network is proposed for automatic segmentation and estimation of HC ellipse by minimizing a compound cost function composed of segmentation dice score and MSE of ellipse parameters. Experimental results on fetus ultrasound dataset in different trimesters of …
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学计算机科学与工程学系）；National-Regional Key Technology Engineering Laboratory for Medical Ultrasound, Guangdong Key Laboratory for Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound Imaging, School of Biomedical Engineering, Health Science Center, Shenzhen University（深圳大学医学部生物医学工程学院）
3D ultrasound (US) can facilitate detailed prenatal examinations for fetal growth monitoring. To analyze a 3D US volume, it is fundamental to identify anatomical landmarks of the evaluated organs accurately. Typical deep learning methods usually regress the coordinates directly or involve heatmap-matching. However, these methods struggle to deal with volumes with large sizes and the highly-varying positions and orientations of fetuses. In this work, we exploit an object detection framework to detect landmarks in 3D fetal facial US volumes. By regressing multiple parameters of the landmark-cent…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation（盖伊和圣托马斯国民保健服务基金会）
Measurement of head biometrics from fetal ultrasonography images is of key importance in monitoring the healthy development of fetuses. However, the accurate measurement of relevant anatomical structures is subject to large inter-observer variability in the clinic. To address this issue, an automated method utilizing Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN) is proposed to determine measurements of fetal head circumference (HC) and biparietal diameter (BPD). An FCN was trained on approximately 2000 2D ultrasound images of the head with annotations provided by 45 different sonographers during routine …
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Pittsburgh Medical Center（匹兹堡大学医学中心）；Cosmetic Surgery Facility LLC（美容外科机构有限责任公司）
We present W-Net, a novel Convolution Neural Network (CNN) framework that employs raw ultrasound waveforms from each A-scan, typically referred to as ultrasound Radio Frequency (RF) data, in addition to the gray ultrasound image to semantically segment and label tissues. Unlike prior work, we seek to label every pixel in the image, without the use of a background class. To the best of our knowledge, this is also the first deep-learning or CNN approach for segmentation that analyses ultrasound raw RF data along with the gray image. International patent(s) pending [PCT/US20/37519]. We chose subc…
Sano Centre for Computational Medicine（萨诺计算医学中心）；Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；Fetai Health Ltd.（Fetai健康有限公司）；Medical University of Warsaw（华沙医科大学）；Tooploox（Tooploox公司）
In this paper, we propose an end-to-end multi-task neural network called FetalNet with an attention mechanism and stacked module for spatio-temporal fetal ultrasound scan video analysis. Fetal biometric measurement is a standard examination during pregnancy used for the fetus growth monitoring and estimation of gestational age and fetal weight. The main goal in fetal ultrasound scan video analysis is to find proper standard planes to measure the fetal head, abdomen and femur. Due to natural high speckle noise and shadows in ultrasound data, medical expertise and sonographic experience are requ…
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
Ultrasound (US) is the most widely used fetal imaging technique. However, US images have limited capture range, and suffer from view dependent artefacts such as acoustic shadows. Compounding of overlapping 3D US acquisitions into a high-resolution volume can extend the field of view and remove image artefacts, which is useful for retrospective analysis including population based studies. However, such volume reconstructions require information about relative transformations between probe positions from which the individual volumes were acquired. In prenatal US scans, the fetus can move indepen…
3D Freehand Ultrasound using Visual Inertial and Deep Inertial Odometry for Measuring Patellar Tracking
Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour（感知、行动与行为研究所）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；NDORMS（诺丁汉大学医院医学院（牛津大学））；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Faculty of Engineering（工程学院）；Free University of Bozen-Bolzano（波尔扎诺自由大学）；Oxford Robotics Institute（牛津大学机器人研究所）
Dual Agreement Consistency Learning for Semi-Supervised Fetal Ultrasound Segmentation
Research Ireland Centre for Research Training in Machine Learning（爱尔兰研究机器学习研究中心）；School of Medicine, University College Dublin（都柏林大学医学院）；School of Computer Science, University College Dublin（都柏林大学计算机科学学院）；School of Computer Science and Digital Technologies, Aston University（阿斯顿大学计算机科学与数字技术学院）
Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）；Mount Sinai Hospital（西奈山医院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Over the last few decades, Lung Ultrasound (LUS) has been increasingly used to diagnose and monitor different lung diseases in neonates. It is a non invasive tool that allows a fast bedside examination while minimally handling the neonate. Acquiring a LUS scan is easy, but understanding the artifacts concerned with each respiratory disease is challenging. Mixed artifact patterns found in different respiratory diseases may limit LUS readability by the operator. While machine learning (ML), especially deep learning can assist in automated analysis, simply feeding the ultrasound images to an ML m…
Deep Learning with Information Fusion and Model Interpretation for Health Monitoring of Fetus based on Long-term Prenatal Electronic Fetal Heart Rate Monitoring Data
Peking University（北京大学）；Peking University First Hospital（北京大学第一医院）；Peking University Third Hospital（北京大学第三医院）；National Clinical Research Center for Obstetrics and Gynecology (Peking University Third Hospital)（国家妇产疾病临床医学研究中心（北京大学第三医院））
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；NAAMII（NAAMII研究所）
Manual estimation of fetal Head Circumference (HC) from Ultrasound (US) is a key biometric for monitoring the healthy development of fetuses. Unfortunately, such measurements are subject to large inter-observer variability, resulting in low early-detection rates of fetal abnormalities. To address this issue, we propose a novel probabilistic Deep Learning approach for real-time automated estimation of fetal HC. This system feeds back statistics on measurement robustness to inform users how confident a deep neural network is in evaluating suitable views acquired during free-hand ultrasound exami…
Intrapartum Ultrasound Image Segmentation of Pubic Symphysis and Fetal Head Using Dual Student-Teacher Framework with CNN-ViT Collaborative Learning
College of Information Science and Technology, Jinan University（暨南大学信息科学技术学院）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Traditional Chinese Medicine Information Technology, Jinan University（暨南大学广东省中医信息技术重点实验室）；Auckland Bioengineering Institute, University of Auckland（奥克兰大学生物工程研究所）；Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA)（加泰罗尼亚研究与高级研究学院（ICREA））
Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London（伦敦大学学院医学图像计算中心）；Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford（牛津大学生物医学工程研究所）；Department of Diagnostic Imaging, Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust（伦敦皇家自由NHS基金会信托诊断影像科）
Sonography synthesis has a wide range of applications, including medical procedure simulation, clinical training and multimodality image registration. In this paper, we propose a machine learning approach to simulate ultrasound images at given 3D spatial locations (relative to the patient anatomy), based on conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs). In particular, we introduce a novel neural network architecture that can sample anatomically accurate images conditionally on spatial position of the (real or mock) freehand ultrasound probe. To ensure an effective and efficient spatial in…
FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希·亚历山大大学）；University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校）
Chronic wounds including diabetic and arterial/venous insufficiency injuries have become a major burden for healthcare systems worldwide. Demographic changes suggest that wound care will play an even bigger role in the coming decades. Predicting and monitoring response to therapy in wound care is currently largely based on visual inspection with little information on the underlying tissue. Thus, there is an urgent unmet need for innovative approaches that facilitate personalized diagnostics and treatments at the point-of-care. It has been recently shown that ultrasound imaging can monitor resp…
COVID-Net USPro: An Open-Source Explainable Few-Shot Deep Prototypical Network to Monitor and Detect COVID-19 Infection from Point-of-Care Ultrasound Images
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；National Research Council Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
Fetal ultrasounds are an essential part of prenatal care and can be used to estimate gestational age (GA). Accurate GA assessment is important for providing appropriate prenatal care throughout pregnancy and identifying complications such as fetal growth disorders. Since derivation of GA from manual fetal biometry measurements (head, abdomen, femur) are operator-dependent and time-consuming, there have been a number of research efforts focused on using artificial intelligence (AI) models to estimate GA using standard biometry images, but there is still room to improve the accuracy and reliabil…
Assessing the health of both the fetus and mother is vital in preventing and identifying possible complications in pregnancy. This paper focuses on a device that can be used effectively by the mother herself with minimal supervision and provide a reasonable estimation of fetal and maternal health while being safe, comfortable, and easy to use. The device proposed uses a belt with a single accelerometer over the mother's uterus to record the required information. The device is expected to monitor both the mother and the fetus constantly over a long period and provide medical professionals with …
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Leiden University Medical Center（莱顿大学医学中心）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Two-dimensional (2D) freehand ultrasound is the mainstay in prenatal care and fetal growth monitoring. The task of matching corresponding cross-sectional planes in the 3D anatomy for a given 2D ultrasound brain scan is essential in freehand scanning, but challenging. We propose AdLocUI, a framework that Adaptively Localizes 2D Ultrasound Images in the 3D anatomical atlas without using any external tracking sensor.. We first train a convolutional neural network with 2D slices sampled from co-aligned 3D ultrasound volumes to predict their locations in the 3D anatomical atlas. Next, we fine-tune …
Point-of-Care Real-Time Signal Quality for Fetal Doppler Ultrasound Using a Deep Learning Approach
Emory University（埃默里大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Center for Indigenous Health Research, Wuqu’ Kawoq — Maya Health Alliance（原住民健康研究中心，Wuqu’ Kawoq — 玛雅健康联盟）
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Background: Thyroid volumetry is crucial in diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of thyroid diseases. However, conventional thyroid volumetry with 2D ultrasound is highly operator-dependent. This study compares 2D ultrasound and tracked 3D ultrasound with an automatic thyroid segmentation based on a deep neural network regarding inter- and intraobserver variability, time and accuracy. Volume reference was MRI. Methods: 28 healthy volunteers were scanned with 2D and 3D ultrasound as well as by MRI. Three physicians (MD 1, 2, 3) with different levels of experience (6, 4 and 1 a) performed three 2…
Automated Fetal Biometry Assessment with Deep Ensembles using Sparse-Sampling of 2D Intrapartum Ultrasound Images
Oxford Machine Learning in NeuroImaging Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford（牛津大学计算机科学系）；Visual Geometry Group, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford（牛津大学工程科学系）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算科学与数据科学学院）
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）
Ultrasound elastography is used to estimate the mechanical properties of the tissue by monitoring its response to an internal or external force. Different levels of deformation are obtained from different tissue types depending on their mechanical properties, where stiffer tissues deform less. Given two radio frequency (RF) frames collected before and after some deformation, we estimate displacement and strain images by comparing the RF frames. The quality of the strain image is dependent on the type of motion that occurs during deformation. In-plane axial motion results in high-quality strain…
Ultrasound Elastography aims to determine the mechanical properties of the tissue by monitoring tissue deformation due to internal or external forces. Tissue deformations are estimated from ultrasound radio frequency (RF) signals and are often referred to as time delay estimation (TDE). Given two RF frames I1 and I2, we can compute a displacement image which shows the change in the position of each sample in I1 to a new position in I2. Two important challenges in TDE include high computational complexity and the difficulty in choosing suitable RF frames. Selecting suitable frames is of high im…
Medical ultrasound technology is widely used in routine clinical applications such as disease diagnosis and treatment as well as other applications like real-time monitoring of human tongue shapes and motions as visual feedback in second language training. Due to the low-contrast characteristic and noisy nature of ultrasound images, it might require expertise for non-expert users to recognize tongue gestures. Manual tongue segmentation is a cumbersome, subjective, and error-prone task. Furthermore, it is not a feasible solution for real-time applications. In the last few years, deep learning m…
Multi-Atlas Segmentation and Spatial Alignment of the Human Embryo in First Trimester 3D Ultrasound
Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam（伊拉斯姆斯医学中心鹿特丹大学医学中心）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Erasmus MC, University Medical Center（伊拉斯姆斯医学中心大学医学中心）
Boston Children’s Hospital（波士顿儿童医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Hyperfine Research Inc.（Hyperfine研究公司）
Fetal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is challenged by uncontrollable, large, and irregular fetal movements. It is, therefore, performed through visual monitoring of fetal motion and repeated acquisitions to ensure diagnostic-quality images are acquired. Nevertheless, visual monitoring of fetal motion based on displayed slices, and navigation at the level of stacks-of-slices is inefficient. The current process is highly operator-dependent, increases scanner usage and cost, and significantly increases the length of fetal MRI scans which makes them hard to tolerate for pregnant women. To help b…
Switchable deep beamformer for high-quality and real-time passive acoustic mapping
School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学信息科学与技术学院）；Gene Editing Center, School of Life Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学生命科学与技术学院基因编辑中心）；State Key Laboratory of Advanced Medical Materials and Devices, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学先进医用材料与设备国家重点实验室）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学智能视觉与影像上海工程研究中心）；Key Laboratory of Biomedical Imaging Science and System, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院生物医学成像科学与系统重点实验室）
