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Robust border enhancement and detection for measurement of fetal nuchal translucency in ultrasound images

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Abstract

Ultrasonic measurement of nuchal translucency (NT) thickness in the first trimester of pregnancy has recently been proposed as the most useful marker in early screening for fetal chromosomal abnormalities. However, manual tracing of the two echogenic lines in the image, using on-screen calipers, is hampered by weak edges, together with noise and other artifacts, leading to variable results and inefficiency. Our semi-automatic method of fetal NT thickness measurement uses a coherence-enhancing diffusion filter to enhance the border and reduce noise, followed by detection of the NT by minimization of a cost function, that combines intensity, edge strength and continuity, using dynamic programming. This method has been validated by determining the correlation between manual and semi-automatic measurements.

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Acknowledgments

This work is financially supported by the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development (MOE), the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy (MOCIE) and the Ministry of Labor (MOLAB) through the fostering project of the Lab of Excellency, and by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Evaluation and Planning (KISTEP), under the Real Time Molecular Imaging program. We would like to thank the Medison Co. Ltd. for providing ultrasound image datasets for our experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea

    Yu-Bu Lee, Min-Jeong Kim & Myoung-Hee Kim

  2. Center for Computer Graphics and Virtual Reality, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea

    Myoung-Hee Kim

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  1. Yu-Bu Lee
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  2. Min-Jeong Kim
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  3. Myoung-Hee Kim
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Correspondence to Myoung-Hee Kim.

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Lee, YB., Kim, MJ. & Kim, MH. Robust border enhancement and detection for measurement of fetal nuchal translucency in ultrasound images. Med Bio Eng Comput 45, 1143–1152 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-007-0225-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-007-0225-7

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