COMFormer: Classification of Maternal-Fetal and Brain Anatomy Using a Residual Cross-Covariance Attention Guided Transformer in Ultrasound

IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2023 Nov;70(11):1417-1427. doi: 10.1109/TUFFC.2023.3311879. Epub 2023 Nov 1.

Abstract

Monitoring the healthy development of a fetus requires accurate and timely identification of different maternal-fetal structures as they grow. To facilitate this objective in an automated fashion, we propose a deep-learning-based image classification architecture called the COMFormer to classify maternal-fetal and brain anatomical structures present in 2-D fetal ultrasound (US) images. The proposed architecture classifies the two subcategories separately: maternal-fetal (abdomen, brain, femur, thorax, mother's cervix (MC), and others) and brain anatomical structures [trans-thalamic (TT), trans-cerebellum (TC), trans-ventricular (TV), and non-brain (NB)]. Our proposed architecture relies on a transformer-based approach that leverages spatial and global features using a newly designed residual cross-variance attention block. This block introduces an advanced cross-covariance attention (XCA) mechanism to capture a long-range representation from the input using spatial (e.g., shape, texture, intensity) and global features. To build COMFormer, we used a large publicly available dataset (BCNatal) consisting of 12 400 images from 1792 subjects. Experimental results prove that COMFormer outperforms the recent CNN and transformer-based models by achieving 95.64% and 96.33% classification accuracy on maternal-fetal and brain anatomy, respectively.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Brain* / diagnostic imaging
  • Electric Power Supplies
  • Female
  • Femur
  • Humans
  • Pregnancy
  • Ultrasonography
  • Ultrasonography, Prenatal*