Standard Plane Localization in Fetal Ultrasound via Domain Transferred Deep Neural Networks

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2015 Sep;19(5):1627-36. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2015.2425041. Epub 2015 Apr 21.

Abstract

Automatic localization of the standard plane containing complicated anatomical structures in ultrasound (US) videos remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a learning-based approach to locate the fetal abdominal standard plane (FASP) in US videos by constructing a domain transferred deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Compared with previous works based on low-level features, our approach is able to represent the complicated appearance of the FASP and hence achieve better classification performance. More importantly, in order to reduce the overfitting problem caused by the small amount of training samples, we propose a transfer learning strategy, which transfers the knowledge in the low layers of a base CNN trained from a large database of natural images to our task-specific CNN. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method for the FASP localization as well as the CNN only trained on the limited US training samples. The proposed approach can be easily extended to other similar medical image computing problems, which often suffer from the insufficient training samples when exploiting the deep CNN to represent high-level features.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Abdomen / diagnostic imaging
  • Female
  • Fetus / physiology
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Pregnancy
  • ROC Curve
  • Ultrasonography, Prenatal / methods*