The motivation of this paper is to analyse the efficiency and reliability of our proposed algorithm of femur length (FL) measurement for the estimation of gestational age. The automated methods are divided into the following components: threshold, segmentation and extraction. Each component is examined, and improvements are made with the objective of finding the optimal result for FL measurement. The methods are tested with a total of 200 different digitized ultrasound images from our database collection. Overall, the study shows that the watershed-based segmentation method combined with enhanced femur extraction algorithm and a 12 x 12 block averaging seed-point threshold method perform identically well with the expert measurements for every image tested and superior as compared to a previous method.
By applying a hexagon-diamond search (HDS) method to an ultrasound image, the path of an object is able to be monitored by extracting images into macro-blocks, thereby achieving image redundancy is reduced from one frame to another, and also ascertaining the motion vector within the parameters searched. The HDS algorithm uses six search points to form the six sides of the hexagon pattern, a centre point, and a further four search points to create diamond pattern within the hexagon that clarifies the focus of the subject area.