Fetal organ detection using feature enhancement with attention and residual block

Abstract

The rapid advancements in fetal ultrasonography have significantly enhanced prenatal diagnosis in recent years. Deep learning (DL) architectures have further streamlined the process of organ detection, improved diagnostic accuracy, and reduced observer dependency. This study proposes a computer-aided DL approach for fetal organ segmentation using the you only look once (YOLO) algorithm, a state-of-the-art method for object detection and image segmentation. This study identified and classified 15 fetal organs, including the umbilical vein, stomach, abdomen, brain (trans-cerebellum, trans-thalamic, and trans-ventricular regions), femur, head, thorax (chest cavity), heart (circumference, left atrium, left ventricle, right atrium, right ventricle), and aorta. We compared the performance of YOLOv7, YOLOv8, YOLOv9, and YOLOv11 architectures. The results showed that YOLOv9 outperformed YOLOv7, YOLOv8, and YOLOv11 achieving mAP50 and mAP95 scores of 91.90% and 94.50%, respectively. This performance surpasses previous studies that focused on classifying only a limited number of fetal organs.