Patent ID: 7783095

Claim:
A method for segmenting and measuring anatomical structures in fetal ultrasound images comprising the steps of: providing a digitized 3-dimensional ultrasound image of a fetus comprising a plurality of intensities corresponding to a domain of points on a 3-dimensional grid; providing a plurality of classifiers trained to detect anatomical structures in said image of said fetus; segmenting and measuring an anatomical structure using said image classifiers by applying elliptical contour classifiers to said fetal ultrasound image, wherein a plurality of 2-dimensional contours characterizing said anatomical structure are detected; and combining said anatomical structure measurement with measurement of another anatomical structure to estimate gestational age of said fetus by approximating a distribution and uncertainty for each measurement, projecting each measurement distribution and uncertainty onto a gestational age axis of a gestational biometric chart to obtain a gestational age hypothesis for each measurement, estimating the distribution of the gestational age hypotheses, and fusing said age hypotheses using a variable bandwidth density-based fusion wherein a majority vote of said multiple hypotheses estimates said gestational age.