Comparison studies of 2D and 3D ultrasound biparietal diameter for gestational age estimation

Accurate determination of gestational age is fundamental to fetal growth assessment, either clinically or by ultrasound evaluation. The antenatal measurement of the fetal biparietal diameter (BPD) by ultrasound has been used to predict fetal gestational age. The performance of conventional two-dimensional (2D) ultrasonograhpy (US) measurement and proposed Visualization toolkit, VTK programmable interactive three-dimensional (3D) for gestational age prediction is investigated in this paper. Data has been acquired in the form of video clip and DICOM file. Three-dimensional BPD reconstructions were visualized using open-source object-oriented Visualization toolkit, VTK. Ten trial measurements were taken for each method. Descriptive analysis of both UTV 380 and DICOM were calculated. Computed mean and standard deviation for both measurements are 47.326±0.643345mm (UTV 380) and 47.099±0.377343mm (DICOM). Computed mean and standard deviation for 2D measurement is 46.290±0.455705mm. Using 3D volume acquisition, it is feasible to perform and interpret a structural survey with higher accuracy in which a 2D survey is performed. Further research is necessary to standardize the acquisition of volumes to minimize artifacts and produce uniform images.