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Updated: Jun 27, 2025
Murine Fetal Echocardiography
Published on: February 15, 2013
Statistical Characterisation of Fetal Anatomy in Simple Obstetric Ultrasound Video Sweeps
Alexander D Gleed1, Divyanshu Mishra1, Alice Self2
1Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Objective:
We present a statistical characterisation of fetal anatomies in obstetric ultrasound video sweeps where the transducer follows a fixed trajectory on the maternal abdomen.
Methods:
Large-scale, frame-level manual annotations of fetal anatomies (head, spine, abdomen, pelvis, femur) were used to compute common frame-level anatomy detection patterns expected for breech, cephalic, and transverse fetal presentations, with respect to video sweep paths. The patterns, termed statistical heatmaps, quantify the expected anatomies seen in a simple obstetric ultrasound video sweep protocol. In this study, a total of 760 unique manual annotations from 365 unique pregnancies were used.
Results:
We provide a qualitative interpretation of the heatmaps assessing the transducer sweep paths with respect to different fetal presentations and suggest ways in which the heatmaps can be applied in computational research (e.g., as a machine learning prior).
Conclusion:
The heatmap parameters are freely available to other researchers (https://github.com/agleed/calopus_statistical_heatmaps).
