Structure-Augmented Standard Plane Detection with Temporal Aggregation in Blind-Sweep Fetal Ultrasound

2026-04-22

AI Summary

In blind fetal ultrasound scanning, the detection of standard biometric planes is highly challenging due to uncontrolled probe motion and highly variable slice orientations. To address this, this work proposes a novel approach that, for the first time, incorporates semantic segmentation of abdominal anatomical structures as an anatomical prior into deep features. Furthermore, a temporal sliding window is employed to aggregate information across consecutive frames, enhancing the robustness of keyframe localization. This strategy effectively mitigates the instability of standard plane boundaries and significantly improves both the accuracy and consistency of detecting anatomically meaningful standard planes, thereby supporting reliable fetal biometric measurements.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Segmentation
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Activity and Plan Recognition
• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web query analysis, representation and understanding
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

In low-resource settings, blind-sweep ultrasound provides a practical and accessible method for identifying fetal growth restriction. However, unlike freehand ultrasound which is subjectively controlled, detection of biometry plane in blind-sweep ultrasound is more challenging due to the uncontrolled fetal structure to be observed and the variaties of oblique planes in the scan. In this work, we propose a structure-augmented system to detect fetal abdomen plane, where the abdominal structure is highlighted using a segmentation prior. Since standard planes are emerging gradually, the decision boundary of the keyframes is unstable to predict. We thus aggregated the structure-augmented planes with a temporal sliding window to help stabilise keyframe localisation. Extensive results indicate that the structure-augmented temporal sliding strategy significantly improves and stabilises the detection of anatomically meaningful planes, which enables more reliable biometric measurements in blind-sweep ultrasound.

Problem

• blind-sweep ultrasound
• standard plane detection
• fetal biometry
• keyframe localisation
• abdominal plane

Innovation

• structure-augmented
• temporal aggregation
• blind-sweep ultrasound
• standard plane detection
• fetal biometry