Deep Learning-Based Computer-Aided Classification of Amniotic Fluid Using Ultrasound Images from Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Amniotic Fluid (AF) refers to a protective liquid surrounding the fetus inside the amniotic sac, serving multiple purposes, and hence is a key indicator of fetal health. Determining the AF levels at an early stage helps to ascertain the maturation of lungs and gastrointestinal development, etc. Low AF entails the risk of premature birth, perinatal mortality, and thereby admission to intensive care unit (ICU). Moreover, AF level is also a critical factor in determining early deliveries. Hence, AF detection is a vital measurement required during early ultrasound (US), and its automation is essential. The detection of AF is usually a time-consuming process as it is patient specific. Furthermore, its measurement and accuracy are prone to errors as it heavily depends on the sonographer’s experience. However, automating this process by developing robust, precise, and effective methods for detection will be beneficial to the healthcare community. Therefore, in this paper, we utilized transfer learning models in order to classify the AF levels as normal or abnormal using the US images. The dataset used consisted of 166 US images of pregnant women, and initially the dataset was preprocessed before training the model. Five transfer learning models, namely, Xception, Densenet, InceptionResNet, MobileNet, and ResNet, were applied. The results showed that MobileNet achieved an overall accuracy of 0.94. Overall, the proposed study produces an effective result in successfully classifying the AF levels, thereby building automated, effective models reliant on transfer learning in order to aid sonographers in evaluating fetal health.

Keywords

• amniotic fluid (AF)
• artificial intelligence
• deep learning
• transfer learning
• ultrasound
• classification