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Updated: Dec 26, 2025
High Frequency Ultrasound for the Analysis of Fetal and Placental Development In Vivo
Published on: November 8, 2018
[Evaluation of a measurement tool with real-time display of the standard value for fetal biometrics]
L Maretti-Reheis1, F Séverac2, R Favre1
1Service de gynécologie obstétrique, hôpitaux universitaires de Strasbourg, avenue Molière, BP 426, 67091 Strasbourg cedex, France.
Objectives:
Most of the ultrasound machines include a tool allowing real-time display of the standard value of the biometric measurement being taken. Our hypothesis was that this tool influences the sonographer as measurements are taken, by inducing a normalization, thus a tendency towards the 50th percentile. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of a real-time display of the standard value in prenatal ultrasound screening.
Methods:
We conducted an observational, prospective, controlled and open study including all patients who underwent a prenatal ultrasound scan in the 2nd or 3rd trimester at the University Hospitals in Strasbourg between December 2017 and June 2018. Exclusion criteria were the presence of a fetal morphological abnormality or a karyotypic abnormality. The tool being tested was the real-time display on screen of the gestational age, of which the measurement corresponds to the 50th percentile. The measurements were retrospectively transformed into Z-scores. The main end-point was to compare the distribution of Z-scores between the groups.
Results:
We included 3551 ultrasound examinations: 696 performed with the tool and 2796 performed without. Fifty-nine scans were excluded due to morphological abnormalities. There was no statistically significant difference between the Z-scores distributions of measurements performed with or without the tool, regardless of the parameter studied. There was also no difference in the detection of pathological measurements: below the 10th percentile or above the 90th percentile.
Conclusion:
The use of such a tool does not seem to be detrimental to biometric screening, but on the other hand does not seem useful either.
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