FetusMapV2: Enhanced Fetal Pose Estimation in 3D Ultrasound
Chaoyu Chen Xin Yang Yuhao Huang Wenlong Shi Yan Cao Mingyuan Luo Xindi Hu Lei Zhue Lequan Yu Kejuan Yue Yuanji Zhang Yi Xiong Dong Ni Weijun Huang
Fetal pose estimation in 3D ultrasound (US) involves identifying a set of
associated fetal anatomical landmarks. Its primary objective is to provide
comprehensive information about the fetus through landmark connections, thus
benefiting various critical applications, such as biometric measurements, plane
localization, and fetal movement monitoring. However, accurately estimating the
3D fetal pose in US volume has several challenges, including poor image
quality, limited GPU memory for tackling high dimensional data, symmetrical or
ambiguous anatomical structures, and considerable variations in fetal poses. In
this study, we propose a novel 3D fetal pose estimation framework (called
FetusMapV2) to overcome the above challenges. Our contribution is three-fold.
First, we propose a heuristic scheme that explores the complementary network
structure-unconstrained and activation-unreserved GPU memory management
approaches, which can enlarge the input image resolution for better results
under limited GPU memory. Second, we design a novel Pair Loss to mitigate
confusion caused by symmetrical and similar anatomical structures. It separates
the hidden classification task from the landmark localization task and thus
progressively eases model learning. Last, we propose a shape priors-based
self-supervised learning by selecting the relatively stable landmarks to refine
the pose online. Extensive experiments and diverse applications on a
large-scale fetal US dataset including 1000 volumes with 22 landmarks per
volume demonstrate that our method outperforms other strong competitors.