Automatic Measurement of Fetal Abdominal Biometric Parameters—Feasibility on a Portable Ultrasound Device

An automatic method formeasuring the fetal mean abdominal diameter (MAD) or abdominal circumference (AC) with ultrasound is proposed. Froma correctly presented abdominal section suitable for MAD or AC measurement, thelocation of fetal abdomen is detected by image processing. Thereafter, an activecontour model is converged along the abdominal boundary for measurementpurposes. The validation data set contained 310 images of fetuses withgestational age (GA) from 14 to 41 weeks. The measurement success rate was 88.1%. Bymanually indicating the location of the abdomen, thesuccess rate was further improved to 95.8% for the failed cases. Thecorrelation between manual and automatic measurements was 0.95 and theintraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was 0.976 (95% confidence interval(CI); 0.969 - 0.981). The average method execution time was 0.3 s. The mean error waslower in young fetuses (0.4%) than in olderfetuses (-2.1%). Theproposed cross-platform methodwas implemented on a portable, low-cost ultrasound machine prototype targeted for low- and middle-income countries(LMIC); the results achieved were comparable to those of other state-of-the-art automatic methods.