Assessment of Fetal Biometry Using Ultrasound Images

Assessment of the fetal biometry is one of the important tasks during every phase of pregnancy. The fetal biometry obtained from the fetal Ultrasound images demands well trained and skilled sonographers for the accurate measurements. The fetal biometry are obtained by drawing circles and lines using cursor on the images which may lead to inaccurate measurements and results in inter observer variability. In order to overcome these limitations an automated process is developed. This paper focuses on measuring the length of the femur (FL) and abdominal circumference (AC) to measure the gestational age (GA) and to monitor the growth of the baby in mother's womb. The automated process involves a sequence of image processing techniques to measure the FL & AC that includes nonlinear diffusion technique, morphological operations, Hough transform, Thinning algorithm and ellipse fit algorithm. The computed FL & AC are compared with the clinical values of the considered database. The computed FL & AC helps to calculate the fetal age and estimate the weight of the baby in mother's womb.