Automated measurement of fetal head circumference using 2D ultrasound images
Open accessAbstract
In this paper we present a computer aided detection (CAD) system for automated measurement of the fetal head circumference (HC) in 2D ultrasound images for all trimesters of the pregnancy. The HC can be used to estimate the gestational age and monitor growth of the fetus. Automated HC assessment could be valuable in developing countries, where there is a severe shortage of trained sonographers. The CAD system consists of two steps: First, Haar-like features were computed from the ultrasound images to train a random forest classifier to locate the fetal skull. Secondly, the HC was extracted using Hough transform, dynamic programming and an ellipse fit. The CAD system was trained on 999 images and validated on an independent test set of 335 images from all trimesters. The test set was manually annotated by an experienced sonographer and a medical researcher. The reference gestational age (GA) was estimated using the crown-rump length measurement (CRL). The mean difference between the reference GA and the GA estimated by the experienced sonographer was 0.8 ± 2.6, -0.0 ± 4.6 and 1.9 ± 11.0 days for the first, second and third trimester, respectively. The mean difference between the reference GA and the GA estimated by the medical researcher was 1.6 ± 2.7, 2.0 ± 4.8 and 3.9 ± 13.7 days. The mean difference between the reference GA and the GA estimated by the CAD system was 0.6 ± 4.3, 0.4 ± 4.7 and 2.5 ± 12.4 days. The results show that the CAD system performs comparable to an experienced sonographer. The presented system shows similar or superior results compared to systems published in literature. This is the first automated system for HC assessment evaluated on a large test set which contained data of all trimesters of the pregnancy.
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Five studies used the freely available 'HC18' data set for training and testing algorithms, which contained 1334 2D images from 551 women of the standard fetal head plane.
“Five studies used the freely available ‘HC18’ data set [45] for training and testing the algorithms, which contained 1334 2D images from 551 women of the standard fetal head plane [18,34,37,38,40].”
From Evolving the Era of 5D Ultrasound? A Systematic Literature Review on the Applications for Artificial Intelligence Ultrasound Imaging in Obstetrics and Gynecology (2023) · cites this paper as [45]
The Materials and methods > Data section reports 1,334 2D fetal-head ultrasound images from 551 pregnant women, and the Discussion > Study limitations section indicates that obtaining the 2D standard plane was required. Our copy does not identify the dataset as ‘HC18’ or establish that it was freely available. The five studies are cited separately in the citing sentence, so their use of the dataset is not attributed to this source. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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ConfIC-RCA: Statistically Grounded Efficient Estimation of Segmentation Quality
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“2 including SCD [44], HC18 [45], PSFHS [46], PH2 [47], ISIC 2018 [48], NuCLS [49], JSRT [50], 3D-IRCAdB [51], WBC-CV and WBC-JTSC [52].”
- Authors
- van den Heuvel, T. L. A., de Bruijn, D., de Korte, C. L., & Ginneken, B. V.
- Affiliations
- Radboud University Medical Center (NL)
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2018-08-23
- Volume
- 13
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- e0200412
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC6107118
- OpenAlex
- W2888303187
- Cited by
- 280
- References
- 27
- Citations by year
- 2026: 52 · 2025: 47 · 2024: 39 · 2023: 31 · 2022: 44 · 2021: 25 · 2020: 32 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 8.38
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Publikationsdatenbank der Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Fraunhofer-Publica (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) (submittedVersion)
- Radboud Repository (Radboud University) (submittedVersion)
- Radboud Repository (Radboud University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- Life Sciences & Health for Development (LSH14ET04)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health › Prenatal Screening and Diagnostics
- Keywords
- fetal head circumference, computer-aided detection, two-dimensional ultrasound, gestational age estimation, Haar-like features, random forest, Hough transform, ellipse fitting, crown-rump length, fetal growth monitoring
- MeSH terms
- Automation, Female, Fetus, Gestational Age, Head, Humans, Pregnancy, Ultrasonography, Prenatal, Fetal Development
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