Automatic detection and measurement of nuchal translucency

Abstract

In this paper we propose a new methodology to support the physician both to identify automatically the nuchal region and to obtain a correct thickness measurement of the nuchal translucency. The thickness of the nuchal translucency is one of the main markers for screening of chromosomal defects such as trisomy 13, 18 and 21. Its measurement is performed during ultrasound scanning in the first trimester of pregnancy. The proposed methodology is mainly based on wavelet and multi resolution analysis. The performance of our method was analysed on 382 random frames, representing mid-sagittal sections, uniformly extracted from real clinical ultrasound videos of 12 patients. According to the ground-truth provided by an expert physician, we obtained a true positive rate equal to 99.95% with respect to the nuchal region detection and about 64% of measurements present an error equal to 1 pixel (which corresponds to 0.1mm), respectively.

Keywords: First trimester of pregnancy; Median sagittal section; Nuchal translucency; Ultrasound fetal examination; Wavelet analysis.