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Consistent reconstruction of 4D fetal heart ultrasound images to cope with fetal motion

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

4D ultrasound imaging of the fetal heart relies on reconstructions from B-mode images. In the presence of fetal motion, current approaches suffer from artifacts, which are unrecoverable for single sweeps.

Methods

We propose to use many sweeps and exploit the resulting redundancy to automatically recover from motion by reconstructing a 4D image which is consistent in phase, space, and time. An interactive visualization framework to view animated ultrasound slices from 4D reconstructions on arbitrary planes was developed using a magnetically tracked mock probe.

Results

We first quantified the performance of 10 4D reconstruction formulations on simulated data. Reconstructions of 14 in vivo sequences by a baseline, the current state-of-the-art, and the proposed approach were then visually ranked with respect to temporal quality on orthogonal views. Rankings from 5 observers showed that the proposed 4D reconstruction approach significantly improves temporal image quality in comparison with the baseline. The 4D reconstructions of the baseline and the proposed methods were then inspected interactively for accessibility to clinically important views and rated for their clinical usefulness by an ultrasound specialist in obstetrics and gynecology. The reconstructions by the proposed method were rated as ‘very useful’ in 71% and were statistically significantly more useful than the baseline reconstructions.

Conclusions

Multi-sweep fetal heart ultrasound acquisitions in combination with consistent 4D image reconstruction improves quality as well as clinical usefulness of the resulting 4D images in the presence of fetal motion.

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Acknowledgements

Funding wa provided by the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation (#16925 PFLS-LS) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (#150620).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer-Assisted Applications in Medicine, Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Christine Tanner, Barbara Flach, Céline Eggenberger, Oliver Mattausch & Orcun Goksel

  2. Departments of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Zurich University Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland

    Michael Bajka

Authors
  1. Christine Tanner
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  2. Barbara Flach
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  3. Céline Eggenberger
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  4. Oliver Mattausch
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  5. Michael Bajka
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  6. Orcun Goksel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christine Tanner.

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All authors declare no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the provincial ethics committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Tanner, C., Flach, B., Eggenberger, C. et al. Consistent reconstruction of 4D fetal heart ultrasound images to cope with fetal motion. Int J CARS 12, 1307–1317 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-017-1624-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-017-1624-3

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