Automatic fetal body and amniotic fluid segmentation from fetal ultrasound images by encoder-decoder network with inner layers.

This paper explores the effectiveness of applying a deep learning based method to segment the amniotic fluid and fetal tissues in fetal ultrasound (US) images. The deeply learned model firstly encodes the input image into down scaled feature maps by convolution and pooling structures, then up-scale the feature maps to confidence maps by corresponded un-pooling and convolution layers. Additional convolution layers with 1×1 sized kernels are adopted to enhance the feature representations, which could be used to further improve the discriminative learning of our model. We effectively update the weights of the network by fine-tuning on part of the layers from a pre-trained model. By conducting experiments using clinical data, the feasibility of our proposed approach is compared and discussed. The result proves that this work achieves satisfied results for segmentation of specific anatomical structures from US images.