How to Cite:
Farsana, W. F., & Kowsalya, N. (2022). Fetal ultrasound image segmentation using dilated multi-
scale-LinkNet. International Journal of Health Sciences, 6(S1), 5282–5295.
https://doi.org/10.53730/ijhs.v6nS1.6047
International Journal of Health Sciences ISSN 2550-6978 E-ISSN 2550-696X © 2022.
Corresponding author: W. Fathima Farsana; Email: afsheensyed84@gmail.com
Manuscript submitted: 27 Feb 2022, Manuscript revised: 18 March 2022, Accepted for publication: 09 April 2022
5282
Fetal ultrasound image segmentation using
dilated multi-scale-LinkNet
W. Fathima Farsana
Research Scholar, Research Department of Computer Science and Applications,
Vivekanandha College of Arts and Sciences for Women, Elayampalayam, Periyar
University, Salem.
Dr. N. Kowsalya
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Sri Vijay Vidyalaya College
of Arts and Science, Nalampalli, Dharmapuri, Tamilnadu, India.
Abstract---Ultrasound imaging is routinely conducted for prenatal
care in many countries to determine the health of the fetus,
the pregnancy's progress, as well as the baby's due date. The intrinsic
property of fetal images during different stages of pregnancy creates
difficulty in automatic extraction of fetal head from ultrasound image
data. The proposed work develops a deep learning model called
Dilated Multi-scale-LinkNet for segmenting fetal skulls automatically
from two dimensional ultrasound image data. The network is modeled
to work with Link-Net since it offers better interpretation in
biomedicine applications. Convolutional layers with dilations are
added following the encoders. The Dilated convolution is used to
expand the size of an image to prevent data loss. Training and
evaluating the model is done using the HC18 grand challenge dataset.
It contains 2D ultrasound images at different pregnancy stages.
The results of experiments performed on an ultrasound images
of women in different pregnancy stages. It reveals that we achieved
94.82% Dice score, 1.9 mm ADF, 0.72 DF and 2.02 HD when
segmenting the fetal skull. Employing Dilated Multi-Scale-LinkNet
improves the accuracy as well as all the evaluation parameters of the
segmentation compared with the existing methods.
Keywords---Fetal ultrasound image segmentation, Deep learning,
Dilated convolution, Encoder-decoder, Link-Net.
Introduction
Ultrasound is a useful tool to monitor fetus and mother during
pregnancy due to its non-invasiveness and less expenses for imaging while