3D fetal face reconstruction from ultrasound imaging

Abstract

The fetal face contains essential information in the evaluation of congenital malformations and the fetal brain function, as its development is driven by genetic factors at early stages of embryogenesis. Three-dimensional ultrasound (3DUS) can provide information about the facial morphology of the fetus, but its use for prenatal diagnosis is challenging due to imaging noise, fetal movements, limited field-of-view, low soft-tissue contrast, and occlusions. In this paper, we propose a fetal face reconstruction algorithm from 3DUS images based on a novel statistical morphable model of newborn faces, the BabyFM. We test the feasibility of using newborn statistics to accurately reconstruct fetal faces by fitting the regularized morphable model to the noisy 3DUS images. The algorithm is capable of reconstructing the whole facial morphology of babies from one or several ultrasound scans to handle adverse conditions (e.g. missing parts, noisy data), and it has the potential to aid in-utero di agnosis for conditions that involve facial dysmorphology.