Towards standard plane prediction of fetal head ultrasound with domain adaption

Fetal Standard Plane (SP) acquisition is a key step in ultrasound based assessment of fetal health. The task detects an ultrasound (US) image with predefined anatomy. However, it requires skill to acquire a good SP in practice, and trainees and occasional users of ultrasound devices can find this challenging. In this work, we consider the task of automatically predicting the fetal head SP from the video approaching the SP. We adopt a domain transfer learning approach that maps the encoded spatial and temporal features of video in the source domain to the spatial representations of the desired SP image in the target domain, together with adversarial training to preserve the quality of the resulting image. Experimental results show that the predicted head plane is plausible and consistent with the anatomical features expected in a real SP. The proposed approach is motivated to support non-experts to find and analyse a trans-ventricular (TV) plane but could also be generalized to other planes, trimesters, and ultrasound imaging tasks for which standard planes are defined.