Cascaded Transforming Multi-task Networks For Abdominal Biometric Estimation from Ultrasound

Matthew D. Sinclair, Juan Cerrolaza Martinez, Emily Skelton, Yuanwei Li, Christian F. Baumgartner, Wenjia Bai, Jacqueline Matthew, Caroline L. Knight, Sandra Smith, Jo Hajnal, Andrew P. King, Bernhard Kainz, Daniel Rueckert

Abstract: Measurement of biometrics from fetal ultrasound (US) images is of key importance in monitoring healthy fetal development. Under the time-constraints of a clinical setting however, accurate measurement of relevant anatomical structures, including abdominal circumference (AC), is subject to large inter-observer variability. To address this, an automated method is proposed to annotate the abdomen in 2D US images and measure AC using a shape-aware, multi-task deep convolutional neural network in a cascaded model framework. The multi-task loss simultaneously optimises both pixel-wise segmentation and shape parameter regression. We also introduce a cascaded shape-based transformation to normalise for position and orientation of the anatomy, improving results further on challenging images. Models were trained using approximately 1700 abdominal images and compared to inter-expert variability on 100 test images. The proposed model performs better than inter-expert variability in terms of mean absolute error for AC measurements (2.60mm vs 5.89mm), and Dice score (0.962 vs 0.955). We also show that on the most challenging test images, the proposed method significantly improves on the baseline model, while running at 8fps which could aid clinical workflow.

Keywords: Fully convolutional network, multi-task learning, auto-context, fetal ultrasound, biometric estimation

Author Affiliation: Imperial College London, King's College London, ETH Zurich