Study and Development of Computer Aided Diagnostic Tools for Ultrasound Imaging of Fetal Cardiac Chambers

Abstract

Congenital Heart Defect (CHD) is a congenital disorder formed during conception of the fetus. Early diagnosis of prenatal CHD is a basic requirement to attain a major reduction in the fetal mortality rates. The clinical assessment mode for antenatal detection of CHD could be a 2D ultrasound scan. This is often preferred due to variety of factors including the low cost and high portability of ultrasound technology compared to most other imaging modalities. The foremost drawback is that the presence of inherent speckle noise, which makes the biological structures to appear with irregular boundaries. The foremost constraint in clinical radiology with manual investigation is that the identification of diagnostically important sonographic markers. Diagnosing CHD from fetal heart 2 Dimensional (2D) US image requires unique set of progressive skills and exclusive exposure in structure identification of fetal heart. The fetal cardiac chambers provide crucial information to the specialist by giving information regarding pumping mechanism of the fetal heart and also indicate any sort of abnormalities if the mechanism fails. Among the different clinical assessment views, the four chamber view is considered as the standard clinical qualitative procedure which has been adopted by most of the sonologist across the globe in clinical assessment. newline newline newline