Standard plane localization in ultrasound by radial component

The acquisition of standard planes is crucial for medical ultrasound (US) diagnosis. In this paper, we present a hierarchical supervised learning framework for automatically detecting standard plane in consecutive 2D US images. The technique is demonstrated by developing a system that localizes fetal abdominal standard plane (FASP) from US videos. We first propose a novel radial component-based model (RCM) to describe the geometric constrains of key anatomical structures (KAS). In order to enhance the detection accuracy, we further adopt random forests classifier for detection of KAS within the regions constrained by RCM. Finally, a second-level classifier combines the results of component detectors to identify a US image as a “FASP” or a “nonFASP”. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms both the full abdomen and the separate anatomy detection methods without geometric constrains.