Diagnostic Plane Extraction from 3D Parametric Surface of the Fetal Cranium

In this paper, we evaluate the viability of using a 3D parametric surface model of the fetal cranium to extract diagnostic 2D ultrasound (US) image planes and biometric measurements useful in fetal growth monitoring. The parametric surface deforms to tightly delineate the inner cranial boundary, and its topology-preserving property defines a coordinate space which allows for consistent sampling of anatomical regions. Our validation experiments comparing diagnostic planes extracted from the parametric surface to those manually selected by a clinical expert demonstrate that the planes are acceptable, and biometric measurements obtained from surface-extracted planes are within clinicallyacceptable error bounds (error=4.82%, n = 191 fetuses).