Automated Screening of Fetal Heart Chambers from 2-D Ultrasound Cine-Loop Sequences

Abstract

Fetal cardiac ultrasonic imaging technique has become increasingly popular in the recent years for the detection of fetal congenital abnormalities at an early stage. Due to the low signal-to-noise ratio of the ultrasound imaging, the automatic detection methods should incorporate suitable preprocessing filtering techniques to enhance the segmentation techniques efficiently. This paper suggests the application of median and morphological filtering operation for removing speckle noise. Then the four heart chambers are segmented independently based on the shape priors. The amorphous snake’s helps in identifying the contours of the chamber edges individually based on shape pattern. Experimental study involves the ultrasound cine-loop sequences of the apical four chamber view of fetal heart with a constant frame rate of 25 frames per second (fps) with varying duration of 10-30s encompassing a range of 20-40 complete cardiac cycles. The simulation result confirms the suitability of proposed scheme for automated screening of fetal heart chambers.