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The authors developed a new method for automatically and efficiently estimating the boundaries of soft tissue and amniotic fluid and to obtain a fine three dimensional image of the fetus from information given by ultrasonic echo images. The aim of this boundary estimation is to provide clear three dimensional images by shading the surface of the fetus and uterine wall using Lambert shading method. Normally there appears a random granular pattern called 'speckle' on an ultrasonic echo image. Therefore, it is difficult to estimate the soft tissue boundary satisfactorily via a simple method such as threshold value processing. Accordingly, the authors devised a method for classifying attributes into three categories using the neural network: soft tissue, amniotic and boundary. The shape of the grey level histogram was the standard for judgment, made by referring to the peripheral region of the voxel. Its application to the clinical data has shown a fine estimation of the boundary between the fetus or the uterine wall and the amniotic, enabling the details of the three dimensional structure to be observed.
Ohashi et al. (Tue,) studied this question.