Structure-Augmented Standard Plane Detection with Temporal Aggregation in Blind-Sweep Fetal Ultrasound

arXiv cs.CV / 4/23/2026

📰 NewsDeveloper Stack & InfrastructureModels & Research

共有:

Key Points

The study addresses the challenge of detecting fetal biometry standard planes in low-resource blind-sweep ultrasound, where fetal structure and scan obliquity are not controlled.
It proposes a structure-augmented plane detection system that uses a segmentation prior to highlight the fetal abdominal structure and identify the abdomen standard plane.
Because standard planes emerge gradually over time, the authors introduce temporal aggregation via a sliding window to stabilize keyframe localization.
Experimental results on the proposed method show improved accuracy and more stable detection of anatomically meaningful planes, supporting more reliable biometric measurements.

Abstract

In low-resource settings, blind-sweep ultrasound provides a practical and accessible method for identifying fetal growth restriction. However, unlike freehand ultrasound which is subjectively controlled, detection of biometry plane in blind-sweep ultrasound is more challenging due to the uncontrolled fetal structure to be observed and the variaties of oblique planes in the scan. In this work, we propose a structure-augmented system to detect fetal abdomen plane, where the abdominal structure is highlighted using a segmentation prior. Since standard planes are emerging gradually, the decision boundary of the keyframes is unstable to predict. We thus aggregated the structure-augmented planes with a temporal sliding window to help stabilise keyframe localisation. Extensive results indicate that the structure-augmented temporal sliding strategy significantly improves and stabilises the detection of anatomically meaningful planes, which enables more reliable biometric measurements in blind-sweep ultrasound.