Reconstruction of Fetal Head Surface from Few 2D Ultrasound Images Tracked in 3D Space

Abstract

In this pilot study, we present a new engineering approach to reconstruct a patient-specific model of the fetal head near term. Indeed, 3D visualization of the fetus prominent skull could help the obstetricians in decision-making to overcome dystocia, a delivery complication which results in labour obstruction. The full reconstruction pipeline is based on the recording of a small set of tracked 2D ultrasound images around the transthalamic brain plane. The use of 2D ultrasound images tracked in 3D space would allow to superimpose the fetal head model to other reconstructed organs. The fetal head is large at late pregnancy stages which causes occlusions in the ultrasound images. Moreover, fetal motion may affect the consistency of ultrasound images, in particular if many frames are needed. Therefore, we propose to extrapolate the full fetal head surface from 10 focused frames only. The reconstruction performance was evaluated in simulation based on a MRI dataset of 7 patients at 34-36 weeks of pregnancy; our best method achieves 1.6 mm of average reconstruction error.