Automatic measurement of fetal femur length in ultrasound images: a comparison of random forest regression model and SegNet

Abstract

The aim of this work is the preliminary clinical validation and accuracy evaluation of our automatic algorithms in assessing progression fetal femur length (FL) in ultrasound images. To compare the random forest regression model with the SegNet model from the two aspects of accuracy and robustness. In this study, we proposed a traditional machine learning method to detect the endpoints of FL based on a random forest regression model. Deep learning methods based on SegNet were proposed for the automatic measurement method of FL, which utilized skeletonization processing and improvement of the full convolution network. Then the automatic measurement results of the two methods were evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively with the results marked by doctors. 436 ultrasonic fetal femur images were evaluated by the two methods above. Compared the results of the above three methods with doctor's manual annotations, the automatic measurement method of femur length based on the random forest regression model was 1.23 ± 4.66 mm and the method based on SegNet was 0.46 ± 2.82 mm. The indicator for evaluating distance was significantly lower than the previous literature. Measurement method based SegNet performed better in the case of femoral end adhesion, low contrast, and noise interference similar to the shape of the femur. The segNet-based method achieves promising performance compared with the random forest regression model, which can improve the examination accuracy and robustness of the measurement of fetal femur length in ultrasound images.

Keywords

• ultrasonoscopy
• femur length measurement
• random forest
• deep learning
• prenatal diagnosis