Autonomous fetal morphology scan: deep learning + clustering merger – the second pair of eyes behind the doctor

Abstract

The main cause of fetal death, of infant morbidity or mortality during childhood years is attributed to congenital anomalies. They can be detected through a fetal morphology scan. An experienced sonographer (with more than 2000 performed scans) has the detection rate of congenital anomalies around 52%. The rates go down in the case of a junior sonographer, that has the detection rate of 32.5%. One viable solution to improve these performances is to use Artificial Intelligence. The first step in a fetal morphology scan is represented by the differentiation process between the view planes of the fetus, followed by a segmentation of the internal organs in each view plane. This study presents an Artificial Intelligence empowered decision support system that can label anatomical organs using a merger between deep learning and clustering techniques, followed by an organ segmentation with YOLO8. Our framework was tested on a fetal morphology image dataset that regards the fetal abdomen. The experimental results show that the system can correctly label the view plane and the corresponding organs on real-time ultrasound movies.Trial registrationThe study is registered under the name “Pattern recognition and Anomaly Detection in fetal morphology using Deep Learning and Statistical Learning (PARADISE)”, project number 101PCE/2022, project code PN-III-P4-PCE-2021–0057. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov, unique identifying number NCT05738954, date of registration 02.11.2023.