Fetal-Net: enhancing Maternal-Fetal ultrasound interpretation through Multi-Scale convolutional neural networks and Transformers

Ultrasound imaging plays an important role in fetal growth and maternal-fetal health evaluation, but due to the complicated anatomy of the fetus and image quality fluctuation, its interpretation is quite challenging. Although deep learning include Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) have been promising, they have largely been limited to one task or the other, such as the segmentation or detection of fetal structures, thus lacking an integrated solution that accounts for the intricate interplay between anatomical structures. To overcome these limitations, Fetal-Net-a new deep learning architecture that integrates Multi-Scale-CNNs and transformer layers-was developed. The model was trained on a large, expertly annotated set of more than 12,000 ultrasound images across different anatomical planes for effective identification of fetal structures and anomaly detection. Fetal-Net achieved excellent performance in anomaly detection, with precision (96.5%), accuracy (97.5%), and recall (97.8%) showed robustness factor against various imaging settings, making it a potent means of augmenting prenatal care through refined ultrasound image interpretation.