Advancing prenatal healthcare by explainable AI enhanced fetal ultrasound image segmentation using U-Net++ with attention mechanisms

Abstract

Prenatal healthcare development requires accurate automated techniques for fetal ultrasound image segmentation. This approach allows standardized evaluation of fetal development by minimizing time-exhaustive processes that perform poorly due to human intervention. This research develops a segmentation framework through U-Net++ with ResNet backbone features which incorporates attention components for enhancing extraction of features in low contrast, noisy ultrasound data. The model leverages the nested skip connections of U-Net++ and the residual learning of ResNet-34 to achieve state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy. Evaluations of the developed model against the vast fetal ultrasound image collection yielded superior results by reaching 97.52% Dice coefficient as well as 95.15% Intersection over Union (IoU), and 3.91 mm Hausdorff distance. The pipeline integrated Grad-CAM++ allows explanations of the model decisions for clinical utility and trust enhancement. The explainability component enables medical professionals to study how the model functions, which creates clear and proven segmentation outputs for better overall reliability. The framework fills in the gap between AI automation and clinical interpretability by showing important areas which affect predictions. The research shows that deep learning combined with Explainable AI (XAI) operates to generate medical imaging solutions that achieve high accuracy. The proposed system demonstrates readiness for clinical workflows due to its ability to deliver a sophisticated prenatal diagnostic instrument that enhances healthcare results.

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