Automatic Analysis of Fetal Echographic Images
Sandra Vilas Boas, Mário A. T. Figueiredo · 2002
This paper describes a new method for the automatic extraction and measurement of fetal anatomic structures from echographic images. More specifically, we estimate and measure the contours of the femur and of cranial crosssections of fetal bodies. Contour estimation is formulated as a statistical estimation problem, where both the contour and the observation model parameters are unknown. The observation model (or likelihood function) relates, in probabilistic terms, the observed image with the underlying contour. This likelihood function is derived from a region-based image model. The contour and the parameters are estimated according to the maximum likelihood (ML) criterion, via unsupervised deterministic iterative algorithms. Experiments reported in the paper, using synthetic and real images, testify for the adequacy and good performance of the proposed approach.