Segmentation of fetal ultrasound images

This paper describes a new method for segmentation of fetal anatomic structures from echographic images. More specifically, we estimate and measure the contours of the femur and of cranial cross-sections of fetal bodies, which can thus be automatically measured. Contour estimation is formulated as a statistical estimation problem, where both the contour and the observation model parameters are unknown. The observation model (or likelihood function) relates, in probabilistic terms, the observed image with the underlying contour. This likelihood function is derived from a region-based statistical image model. The contour and the observation model parameters are estimated according to the maximum likelihood (ML) criterion, via deterministic iterative algorithms. Experiments reported in the paper, using synthetic and real images, testify for the adequacy and good performance of the proposed approach. (E-mail: sandraj@est.ipcb.pt) (C) 2005 World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine Biology.