Statistical measurement of ultrasound placenta images using segmentation approach

Medical diagnosis is the major challenge faced by the medical experts. Highly specialized tools are necessary to assist the experts in diagnosing the diseases. Gestational Diabetes Mellitus is a condition in pregnant women which increases the blood sugar levels. It complicates the pregnancy by affecting the placental growth. The ultrasound screening of placenta in the initial stages of gestation helps to identify the complication induced by GDM on the placental development which accounts for the fetal growth. This work focus on the classification of ultrasound placenta images into normal and abnormal images based on statistical measurements. The ultrasound images are usually low in resolution which may lead to loss of characteristic features of the ultrasound images. The placenta images obtained in an ultrasound examination is stereo mapped to reconstruct the placenta structure from the ultrasound images. The dimensionality reduction is done on stereo mapped placenta images using wavelet decomposition. The ultrasound placenta image is segmented using watershed approach to obtain the statistical measurements of the stereo mapped placenta images. Using the statistical measurements, the ultrasound placenta images are then classified as normal and abnormal using Back Propagation neural networks.