6533b86efe1ef96bd12cc83f

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Automatic detection and measurement of nuchal translucency.

subject

description

In this paper we propose a new methodology to support the physician both to identify automatically the nuchal region and to obtain a correct thickness measurement of the nuchal translucency. The thickness of the nuchal translucency is one of the main markers for screening of chromosomal defects such as trisomy 13, 18 and 21. Its measurement is performed during ultrasound scanning in the first trimester of pregnancy. The proposed methodology is mainly based on wavelet and multi resolution analysis. The performance of our method was analysed on 382 random frames, representing mid-sagittal sections, uniformly extracted from real clinical ultrasound videos of 12 patients. According to the ground-truth provided by an expert physician, we obtained a true positive rate equal to 99.95% with respect to the nuchal region detection and about 64% of measurements present an error equal to 1 pixel (which corresponds to 0.1mm), respectively. We propose an automatic tool to locate nuchal region in prenatal ultrasound images.The methodology is able to measure the nuchal translucency thickness.Nuchal thickness is an important marker in several chromosomal diseases.Results are validated against the ground-truth provided by an expert physician.