Standard fetal ultrasound plane classification based on stacked ensemble of deep learning models

Identifying standard fetal ultrasound (US) planes with key anatomical structures during mid-pregnancy prenatal screening is crucial for measuring fetal growth parameters and early detection of abnormalities. However, obtaining these standard planes is laborious and time-consuming and depends on the clinical experience of sonographers. Automatic detection of these planes can aid sonographers in identifying the correct standard planes. In recent times, various deep learning techniques have developed to automate the detection of standard fetal US planes. However, a common limitation among these approaches is their dependence on a single model prediction to make the final decision, which introduces the possibility of inaccuracies. Therefore, we propose an automated identification of commonly used standard fetal US planes based on the stacking ensemble of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). The stacking ensemble method employs three pre-trained deep CNNs: AlexNet, VGG-19, and DarkNet-19. Softmax and random forest classifiers are used to get predictions from deep CNNs. The final prediction is made using the absolute majority voting technique. A publicly available fetal US dataset is employed to evaluate the performance of the stacking ensemble approach. The proposed ensemble model classifies fetal US planes into six distinct classes: abdomen, brain, femur, thorax, maternal cervix, and other (less commonly employed planes, such as kidney, and limbs) fetal planes. Experimental findings demonstrate that the stacking ensemble approach achieved high performance with an accuracy of 95.69 %, precision of 94.02 %, recall of 96.28 %, F1-score of 95.08 %, specificity of 99.12 %, and Matthews correlation coefficient of 94.19 % compared to individual deep CNN models and other competing methods.