A system-on-chip solution for deep learning-based automatic fetal biometric measurement

Abstract

Ultrasound assessment of fetal biometry is widely used for gestational age prediction and abnormal fetal growth diagnosis. However, manual biometric measurements require time-consuming procedures and current automated measurement approaches remain challenging in terms of accuracy and computational complexity. This paper proposes deep learning-based efficient automatic fetal biometry measurement method for system-on-chip (SoC) solution. For end-to-end automated measurements, a hardware-friendly bilateral segmentation network (H-BiSeNet) was designed and optimized for multiple fetal objects (i.e., head, abdomen and femur), and fetal biometric parameters were then calculated with a robust multiple keypoint detection algorithm. For hardware implementation with a SoC, a deep learning processing unit (DPU) was employed to accelerate the proposed segmentation network, and biometric measurements with image pre- and postprocessing were conducted on an application processing unit (APU). A total of 6000 fetal ultrasound images in the three regions were collected from 2568 subjects, and the dataset was utilized to train the proposed network. In the performance evaluation, the proposed segmentation network with optimal quantization (H-BiSeNet-Q) outperformed other segmentation networks (i.e., U-Net, U-Net++, Attention U-Net, U-Net3+, DeepLabv3 + and BiSeNetv2) in terms of the average Dice coefficient, and automated measurements with H-BiSeNet-Q were highly correlated with manual measurements (r ≥ 0.983, p < 0.01 for all parameters, i.e., biparietal diameter, head circumference, abdominal circumference and femur length). In the execution time analysis, H-BiSeNet-Q ran at 4.25 frames per second (FPS) with parallelism corresponding to 80% resource utilization in the SoC. These results showed feasibility in low-resource hardware settings such as portable ultrasound systems.