Contour extraction of fetus' head from echocardiogram using snakes

In this paper, we extract contour of the fetus' head from echocardiogram BPD (biparietal diameter) level at 15-25 pregnancy weeks without influenced of the lack of the pixels and noise element for the diagnosis support of the doctor. As for contour of fetus' head, it is effective to the diagnosis of the pregnancy week and degree of deformity before birth. Various evaluation values were automatically calculated as features from the obtained contour. This research consists of preprocessing, contour extraction, and calculation of evaluation value. First, as the preprocessing, the noise is reduced from the original image and an indistinct point has been improved by using the contrast emphasis and median filtering. Next, the contour of fetus' head was extracted by using active contour models SNAKES, more and more highly accurate than a general technique. At last, OFD (occipitofrontal diameter), BPD, were automatically computed from the obtained contour. The improvement of the extraction accuracy was confirmed by setting the best energy parameters for SNAKES in contour extraction. We succeeded in obtaining evaluation values in the same accuracy, compared with those calculated from the contour depicted by the doctor.