Automated placental abruption identification using semantic segmentation, quantitative features, SVM, ensemble and multi-path CNN

Abstract

The placenta is a fundamental organ throughout the pregnancy and the fetus’ health is closely related to its proper function. Because of the importance of the placenta, any suspicious placental conditions require ultrasound image investigation. We propose an automated method for processing fetal ultrasonography images to identify placental abruption using machine learning methods in this paper. The placental imaging characteristics are used as the semantic identifiers of the region of the placenta compared with the amniotic fluid and hard organs. The quantitative feature extraction is applied to the automatically identified placental regions to assign a vector of optical features to each ultrasonographic image. In the first classification step, two methods of kernel-based Support Vector Machine (SVM) and decision tree Ensemble classifier are elaborated and compared for identification of the abruption cases and controls. The Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) is applied for optimizing the feature vector elements for the best performance of each classifier. In the second step, the deep learning classifiers of multi-path ResNet-50 and Inception-V3 are used in combination with RFE. The resulting performances of the algorithms are compared together to reveal the best classification method for the identification of the abruption status. The best results were achieved for optimized ResNet-50 with an accuracy of 82.88% ± SD 1.42% in the identification of placental abruption on the testing dataset. These results show it is possible to construct an automated analysis method with affordable performance for the detection of placental abruption based on ultrasound images.