Estimating Fetal Nuchal Translucency Parameters from its Ultrasound Image

Parameters of the fetal nuchal translucency (NT) are very important for the diagnosis and evaluation of fetuses. Currently these parameters are manually measured from the fetal ultrasound image, which may introduce problems of the variability and reproducibility. Here an automatic scheme is proposed to estimate fetal NT parameters. With a morphologic filtering, this scheme firstly establishes the edge map and extracts a preliminary contour by the gradient vector flow (GVF) snake. Then an algorithm based on the dynamic programming is proposed to compound the edge map and the preliminary contour to obtain the NT contour. Finally, parameters of the NT such as the NT thickness and the NT area are calculated. From the application, it is seen that this scheme simultaneously overcomes problems of discontinuousness and concavities in the contour extraction and parameters of the fetal NT can be automatically calculated.