Abstract
Nowadays the measurement of the nuchal translucency thickness is being used as part of routine ultrasound scanning during the end of the first trimester of pregnancy, for the screening of chromosomal defects, as trisomy 21. Currently, the measurement is being performed manually by physicians. The measurement can take a long time for being accomplished, needs to be performed by highly skilled operators, and is prone to errors. In this paper we present an algorithm that automatically detects the border of the nuchal translucency, once a region of interest has been manually identified. The algorithm is based on the minimisation of a cost function, and the optimisation is performed using the dynamic programming paradigm. The method we present overcomes several of the drawbacks present in the state of the art algorithms.
Chapter PDF
References
Hecht, C., Hook, E.: The imprecision in rates of down syndrome by 1-year maternal age intervals: a critical analysis of rates used in biochemical screening. Prenatal Diagnosis 14, 729–738 (1994)
Nicolaides, K., Sebire, N., Snijders, R.: The 11-14 weeks scan: the diagnosis of fetal abnormalities. Parthenon Publishing, New York (1999)
Nicolaides, K., Azar, G., Byrne, D., Mansur, C., Marrks, K.: Fetal nuchal translucency: ultrasound screening for chromosomal defects in first trimester of pregnancy. BMJ 304, 867–869 (1992)
Pandya, P., Snijders, R., Johnson, S., Brizot, M., Nicolaides, K.: Screening for fetal trisomies by maternal age and fetal nuchal translucency thickness at 10 to 14 weeks of gestation. BJOG 102, 957–962 (1995)
Snijders, R., Noble, P., Souka, A., Nicolaides, K.: UK multicentre project on assesment of risk of trimomy 21 by maternal age and fetal nuchal translucency thickness at 10-14 weeks of gestation. Lancet 352, 343–346 (1998)
Abuhamad, A.: Technical aspects of nuchal translucency measurement. Seminars in perinatology 29, 376–379 (2006)
Pandya, P., Altman, D., Brizot, M., Pettersen, H., Nicolaides, K.: Repeatability of measurement of fetal nuchal translucency thickness. Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology 5, 334–337 (1995)
Lee, Y., Kim, M., Kim, M.: Robust border enhancement and detection for measurement of fetal nuchal translucency in ultrasound images. Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing 45(11), 1143–1152 (2007)
Chalana, V., Winter, T., Cyr, D., Haynor, D., Kim, Y.: Automatic fetal head measurements from sonographic images. Academic Radiology 3(8), 628–635 (1996)
Hanna, C., Youssef, M.: Automated measurements in obstetric ultrasound images. In: Proceedings of the International Conference Image Processing, vol. 3, pp. 714–717 (1997)
Carneiro, G., Georgescu, B., Good, S., Comaniciu, D.: Detection and measurement of fetal anatomies from ultrasound images using a constrained probabilistic boosting tree. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 27(9), 1342–1355 (2008)
Pathak, S., Chalana, V., Kim, Y.: Interactive automatic fetal head measurements from ultrasound images using multimedia computer technology. Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology 23(5), 665–673 (1997)
Bernardino, F., Cardoso, R., Montenegro, N., Bernardes, J., de Sa, J.M.: Semiautomated ultrasonographic measurement of fetal nuchal translucency using a computer software tool. Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology 24(1), 51–54 (1998)
Weikert, J.: Coherence-enhancing diffusion filtering. International Journal of Computer Vision 31(2-3), 111–127 (1999)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Catanzariti, E., Fusco, G., Isgrò, F., Masecchia, S., Prevete, R., Santoro, M. (2009). A Semi-automated Method for the Measurement of the Fetal Nuchal Translucency in Ultrasound Images. In: Foggia, P., Sansone, C., Vento, M. (eds) Image Analysis and Processing – ICIAP 2009. ICIAP 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5716. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04146-4_66
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04146-4_66
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04145-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04146-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)