Automatic heart localization in ultrasound fetal images

Abstract

This paper presents the research developed in order to detect the cardiac structure in echocardiography gray images from the fetal heart. It is based on patten recognition and use a density probability function with the scales of gray. The function is also used for search of the similar cardiac structure, where it is applied on the whole image, and then compared with the pattern of structure in which one interested. In order to obtain the similarity that defines the choice of the structure of interest we use the Bhattacharyya coefficient. The method uses texture features to isolate the region of interest inside the ultrasound image to improve the results and performance. A prototype was developed to evaluate the proposed method. The results of the experiments are also presented in this paper.