Ultrasound Fetal Image Segmentation Techniques: A Review

Abstract

Background: This paper reviews segmentation techniques for 2D ultrasound fetal images. Fetal anatomy measurements derived from the segmentation results are used to monitor the growth of the fetus.

Discussion: The segmentation of fetal ultrasound images is a difficult task due to inherent artifacts and degradation of image quality with gestational age. There are segmentation techniques for particular biological structures such as head, stomach, and femur. The whole fetal segmentation algorithms are only very few.

Conclusion: This paper presents a review of these segmentation techniques and the metrics used to evaluate them are summarized.

Keywords: Segmentation; anatomy; biometric measurements; femur length; fetal; quality metrics; review; ultrasound.