Analysis of semi-automated method for femur length measurement from foetal ultrasound.

The motivation of this paper is to analyse the efficiency and reliability of our proposed algorithm of femur length (FL) measurement for the estimation of gestational age. The automated methods are divided into the following components: threshold, segmentation and extraction. Each component is examined, and improvements are made with the objective of finding the optimal result for FL measurement. The methods are tested with a total of 200 different digitized ultrasound images from our database collection. Overall, the study shows that the watershed-based segmentation method combined with enhanced femur extraction algorithm and a 12 x 12 block averaging seed-point threshold method perform identically well with the expert measurements for every image tested and superior as compared to a previous method.