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摘要
Fetal femur length (FL) is an indispensable fetal measurement in daily obstetric ultrasound examination and essential to estimate fetal size. Automatic segmentation of FL presents a great challenge because of the low signal-to-noise ratio of images and dynamic changes of fetal femur with the gestational age. This paper provides a fully automatic measurement method for FL. An improved 2D phase symmetry method, which is insensitive to speckle noise and intensity variation, is firstly designed to detect the femur bone from ultrasound images. The saliency visual attention model based on image intensity and phase symmetry energy is then introduced for fast selection of the femur. Quantitative validation of the automatic measurement method on synthetic images under different imaging conditions achieves satisfactory measurement accuracy (94.5% +/- 1.6%). Experimental results on 610 clinic images indicate that the automatic method can provide a better FL measurement than the manual measurement. The advantages of the automatic method manifest in two aspects: the FL measurement by the automatic method has a higher degree of fitness to the fetal actual birth weight, and it can improve the accuracy of the fetal weight estimation considerably.
