Richard Droste

Objectives: Operators performing fetal growth scans are usually aware of the actual gestational age. This may lead to an expected value bias when performing biometric measurements. Methods: We prospectively collected full-length video recordings of routine ultrasound growth scans coupled with operator eye tracking. The expected value was defined...

We present the first system that provides real-time probe movement guidance for acquiring standard planes in routine freehand obstetric ultrasound scanning. Such a system can contribute to the worldwide deployment of obstetric ultrasound scanning by lowering the required level of operator expertise. The system employs an artificial neural network t...

Visual saliency modeling for images and videos is treated as two independent tasks in recent computer vision literature. While image saliency modeling is a well-studied problem and progress on benchmarks like SALICON and MIT300 is slowing, video saliency models have shown rapid gains on the recent DHF1K benchmark. Here, we take a step back and ask:...

Image representations are commonly learned from class labels, which are a simplistic approximation of human image understanding. In this paper we demonstrate that transferable representations of images can be learned without manual annotations by modeling human visual attention. The basis of our analyses is a unique gaze tracking dataset of sonogra...

Ultrasound (US)-probe motion estimation is a fundamental problem in automated standard plane locating during obstetric US diagnosis. Most recent existing recent works employ deep neural network (DNN) to regress the probe motion. However, these deep regression-based methods leverage the DNN to overfit on the specific training data, which is naturall...

Ultrasound(US)-probe motion estimation is a fundamental problem in automated standard plane locating during obstetric US diagnosis. Most recent existing recent works employ deep neural network(DNN) to regress the probe motion. However, these deep regression-based methods leverage the DNN to overfit on the specific training data, which is naturally...

Objective: Despite decades of obstetric scanning, the study of sonographer workflow remains largely unexplored. In the second trimester for example, sonographers use scan guidelines to guide their acquisition of standard planes and structures; however, the scan acquisition order is not prescribed. Using deep learning-based video analysis, the aim...

SlowflowHD is a new ultrasound Doppler imaging technology that allows visualization of flow within small blood vessels. In this mode, a proprietary algorithm differentiates between low-speed flow and signals attributed to tissue motion so that microvessel vasculature can be examined. Our objectives were to describe the low-velocity Doppler mode pri...

Automated ultrasound (US)-probe movement guidance is desirable to assist inexperienced human operators during obstetric US scanning. In this paper, we present a new visual-assisted probe movement technique using automated landmark retrieval for assistive obstetric US scanning. In a first step, a set of landmarks is constructed uniformly around a vi...

This paper presents a novel approach to automatic fetal brain biometry motivated by needs in low- and medium- income countries. Specifically, we leverage high-end (HE) ultrasound images to build a biometry solution for low-cost (LC) point-of-care ultrasound images. We propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation approach to train deep models to b...

Ultrasound is the primary modality for obstetric imaging and is highly sonographer dependent. Long training period, insufficient recruitment and poor retention of sonographers are among the global challenges in the expansion of ultrasound use. For the past several decades, technical advancements in clinical obstetric ultrasound scanning have largel...

Automated ultrasound (US)-probe movement guidance is desirable to assist inexperienced human operators during obstetric US scanning. In this paper, we present a new visual-assisted probe movement technique using automated landmark retrieval for assistive obstetric US scanning. In a first step, a set of landmarks is constructed uniformly around a...

Ultrasound is a widely used imaging modality, yet it is well-known that scanning can be highly operator-dependent and difficult to perform, which limits its wider use in clinical practice. The literature on understanding what makes clinical sonography hard to learn and how sonography varies in the field is sparse, restricted to small-scale studies...

In this paper, we consider differentiating operator skill during fetal ultrasound scanning using probe motion tracking. We present a novel convolutional neural network-based deep learning framework to model ultrasound probe motion in order to classify operator skill levels, that is invariant to operators’ personal scanning styles. In this study, pr...

We present the first system that provides real-time probe movement guidance for acquiring standard planes in routine freehand obstetric ultrasound scanning. Such a system can contribute to the worldwide deployment of obstetric ultrasound scanning by lowering the required level of operator expertise. The system employs an artificial neural network t...

We present a novel multi-task neural network called Temporal SonoEyeNet (TSEN) with a primary task to describe the visual navigation process of sonographers by learning to generate visual attention maps of ultrasound images around standard biometry planes of the fetal abdomen, head (trans-ventricular plane) and femur. TSEN has three components: a f...

Anatomical landmarks are a crucial prerequisite for many medical imaging tasks. Usually, the set of landmarks for a given task is predefined by experts. The landmark locations for a given image are then annotated manually or via machine learning methods trained on manual annotations. In this paper, in contrast, we present a method to automatically...

Recent advances in deep learning have achieved promising performance for medical image analysis, while in most cases ground-truth annotations from human experts are necessary to train the deep model. In practice, such annotations are expensive to collect and can be scarce for medical imaging applications. Therefore, there is significant interest in...

Visual saliency modeling for images and videos is treated as two independent tasks in recent computer vision literature. On the one hand, image saliency modeling is a well-studied problem and progress on benchmarks like \mbox{SALICON} and MIT300 is slowing. For video saliency prediction on the other hand, rapid gains have been achieved on the recen...

Recent advances in deep learning have achieved promising performance for medical image analysis, while in most cases ground-truth annotations from human experts are necessary to train the deep model. In practice, such annotations are expensive to collect and can be scarce for medical imaging applications. Therefore, there is significant interest in...

Purpose To analyze bioeffect safety indices and assess how often operators look at these indices during routine obstetric ultrasound. Materials and Methods Automated analysis of prospectively collected data including video recordings of full-length ultrasound scans coupled with operator eye tracking was performed. Using optical recognition, we extr...

For visual tasks like ultrasound (US) scanning, experts direct their gaze towards regions of task-relevant information. Therefore, learning to predict the gaze of sonographers on US videos captures the spatio-temporal patterns that are important for US scanning. The spatial distribution of gaze points on video frames can be represented through heat...

Anatomical landmarks are a crucial prerequisite for many medical imaging tasks. Usually, the set of landmarks for a given task is predefined by experts. The landmark locations for a given image are then annotated manually or via machine learning methods trained on manual annotations. In this paper, in contrast, we present a method to automatically...

For visual tasks like ultrasound (US) scanning, experts direct their gaze towards regions of task-relevant information. Therefore, learning to predict the gaze of sonographers on US videos captures the spatio-temporal patterns that are important for US scanning. The spatial distribution of gaze points on video frames can be represented through heat...

This paper considers automatic clinical workflow description of full-length routine fetal anomaly ultrasound scans using deep learning approaches for spatio-temporal video analysis. Multiple architectures consisting of 2D and 2D + t CNN, LSTM, and convolutional LSTM are investigated and compared. The contributions of short-term and long-term tempor...

Image representations are commonly learned from class labels, which are a simplistic approximation of human image understanding. In this paper we demonstrate that transferable representations of images can be learned without manual annotations by modeling human visual attention. The basis of our analyses is a unique gaze tracking dataset of sonogra...