[Research Progress of Medical Ultrasound Assessment of Placental Function]

Our country has been using maturity grading method, which was proposed by Grammum in 1979, to evaluate the placental function. However, this method is subjective to consequence because it totally depends on the observation and experiences of clinicians. With the development of ultrasound technology, therefore, we reviewed more novel applications in other aspects of placenta (such as blood flow, vascularization, etc). Over the past years, scholars in the world have done a lot of research around these topics. In this review we introduce placental maturity grading with B-mode ultrasound, placental vascularization qualitative and quantitative analysis with three-dimensional Doppler ultrasound and placental volume measurement, respectively.