The vitruvian baby: Interactive reformation of fetal ultrasound data to a T-position

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging and visualization is often used in medical diagnostics, especially in prenatal screening. Screening the development of the fetus is important to assess possible complications early on. State of the art approaches involve taking standardized measurements to compare them with standardized tables. The measurements are taken in a 2D slice view, where precise measurements can be difficult to acquire due to the fetal pose. Performing the analysis in a 3D view would enable the viewer to better discriminate between artefacts and representative information. Additionally making data comparable between different investigations and patients is a goal in medical imaging techniques and is often achieved by standardization. With this paper, we introduce a novel approach to provide a standardization method for 3D ultrasound fetus screenings. Our approach is called “The Vitruvian Baby” and incorporates a complete pipeline for standardized measuring in fetal 3D ultrasound. The input of the method is a 3D ultrasound screening of a fetus and the output is the fetus in a standardized T-pose. In this pose, taking measurements is easier and comparison of different fetuses is possible. In addition to the transformation of the 3D ultrasound data, we create an abstract representation of the fetus based on accurate measurements. We demonstrate the accuracy of our approach on simulated data where the ground truth is known.