Contour extraction of fetus´ head from echocardiogram using Snakes

Summary form only given. We extract a contour of the fetus head from an echocardiogram BPD (biparietal diameter) level at 15-25 pregnancy weeks, without being influenced by the lack of pixels and noise elements, for the diagnostic support of the doctor. As for the contour of the fetus head, it is effective for diagnosis of the pregnancy week and degree of deformity before birth. Various evaluation values were automatically calculated as features from the obtained contour. This research consists of preprocessing, contour extraction, and calculation of the evaluation value. First, as the preprocessing, the noise is reduced from the original image and an indistinct point has been improved by using the contrast emphasis and median filtering. Next, the contour of the fetus head was extracted by using the active contour model Snakes, more highly accurate than a general technique. Finally the OFD (occipitofrontal diameter), BPD, were automatically computed from the obtained contour. The improvement of the extraction accuracy was confirmed by setting the best energy parameters for Snakes in contour extraction. We succeeded in obtaining evaluation values with the same accuracy, compared with those calculated from the contour depicted by the doctor.