A novel method for measurement of fetal volume from US images using segmentation techniques

The paper presents a novel method to measure the volume of a fetus from ultrasonic sound image using image processing technique. Even though Ultrasonic image are poor in diagnostic quality and highly noise susceptible, they are preferred for the reason that Ultrasound imaging techniques were the safest for diagnosing pregnant women fetus, since they are almost free from hazardous radiation. Edge enhancement is made to improve this poor quality image which is to be used as input image for segmentation simultaneously smoothens the unwanted image edge to enhance only important edges of fetus. Anisotropic diffusion technique are used for image enhancement technique. Iso-intensity and Edge-focusing segmentation techniques were applied to US-images to obtain appropriate and clear edge image. By Iso-intensity contour approach, the pixel values with equal intensities were selected. Another contour selection technique, which had been used, was the Edge-focusing technique, which makes use of the differences of importance between different edges in the image. Determining the contour as a set of the points in the 3D-volume was the foremost and important step in fixing the shape of the fetus. The natural shape of body or head is like a sphere or an ellipsoid, both of these figures have been fitted. After the process of fitting an analytical figure has been completed, the volume of fetus can be calculated. These image processing techniques are applied to the fetal image through image processing tool in Matlab software. Post-processing operations are required after each techniques is used.