Fetal lung maturity analysis using ultrasound image features

This pilot study was carried out to find the feasibility of analyzing the maturity of the fetal lung using ultrasound images. Data were collected from normal pregnant women at intervals of two weeks from the gestation age of 24 to 38 weeks. Images were acquired at two centers located at different geographical locations. The total data acquired consisted of 750 images of immature and 250 images of mature class. A region of interest of 64×64 pixels was used for extracting the features. Various textural features were computed from the fetal lung and liver images. The ratios of fetal lung to liver feature values were investigated as possible indexes for classifying the images into those from mature (reduced pulmonary risk) and immature (possible pulmonary risk) lung. The features used are fractal dimension, lacunarity, and features derived from the histogram of the images. The following classifiers were used to classify the fetal lung images as belonging to mature or immature lung: nearest neighbor, k-nearest neighbor, modified k-nearest neighbor, multilayer perceptron, radial basis function network, and support vector machines. The classification accuracy obtained for the testing set ranges from 73% to 96%.