Automated Screening Network for Fetal Closed Spina Bifida With Semantic Enhancement and Projected Attention

Closed spina bifida is a high-incidence developmental disorder among rare fetal diseases. Its signs in ultrasound imaging are subtle, making it prone to misdiagnosis and heavily reliant on sonographers' experience. Therefore, we propose a novel semantic enhancement framework incorporating projected attention for the automated screening of closed spina bifida through precise landmark detection. In this method, we utilize a multi-granularity deep supervision and voting mechanism to generate point-specific features and reconstruct saliency maps for each landmark, effectively reducing interference from homogeneous high-echogenic noise in ultrasound images while preserving rich semantic information. Additionally, a coordinate attention projection module is designed to convert the 2D landmark probability maps into one-dimensional vectors, ensuring low computational complexity along with precise coordinate regression. The clinical application potential of this intelligent system is significant, as it facilitates automated fetal spine counting and anatomical measurement, enabling early warnings of diseases based on identified anomalies. Extensive experiments comparing our method with advanced baselines on an in-house dataset and two public datasets demonstrate its clear advantage in computational complexity and accuracy.