Towards automatic semantic segmentation in volumetric ultrasound

3D ultrasound is rapidly emerging as a viable imaging modality for routine prenatal examinations. However, lacking of efficient tools to decompose the volumetric data greatly limits its widespread. In this paper, we are looking at the problem of volumetric segmentation in ultrasound to promote the volume-based, precise maternal and fetal health monitoring. Our contribution is threefold. First, we propose the first and fully automatic framework for the simultaneous segmentation of multiple objects, including fetus, gestational sac and placenta, in ultrasound volumes, which remains as a rarely-studied but great challenge. Second, based on our customized 3D Fully Convolutional Network, we propose to inject a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to flexibly explore 3D semantic knowledge from a novel, sequential perspective, and therefore significantly refine the local segmentation result which is initially corrupted by the ubiquitous boundary uncertainty in ultrasound volumes. Third, considering sequence hierarchy, we introduce a hierarchical deep supervision mechanism to effectively boost the information flow within RNN and further improve the semantic segmentation results. Extensively validated on our in-house large datasets, our approach achieves superior performance and presents to be promising in boosting the interpretation of prenatal ultrasound volumes. Our framework is general and can be easily extended to other volumetric ultrasound segmentation tasks.