Automated Classification of First-Trimester Fetal Heart Views Using Ultrasound-Specific Self-Supervised Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24492v1
• Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:24:26 GMT
• Title: Automated Classification of First-Trimester Fetal Heart Views Using Ultrasound-Specific Self-Supervised Learning
• Authors: Youssef Megahed, Aylin Erman, Robin Ducharme, Mark C. Walker, Steven Hawken, Adrian D. C. Chan,
• Abstract summary: We evaluate a self-supervised ultrasound foundation model, USF-MAE, for first-trimester fetal heart view classification.<n> USF-MAE is pretrained using masked autoencoding modelling on more than 370,000 unlabelled ultrasound images.<n>It achieved the highest performance across all evaluation metrics, with 90.57% accuracy, 91.15% precision, 90.57% recall, and 90.71% F1-score.
• Score: 0.205246094017924
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Congenital heart disease remains the most common congenital anomaly and a leading cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality. Although first-trimester fetal echocardiography offers an opportunity for earlier detection, automated analysis at this stage is challenging due to small cardiac structures, low signal-to-noise ratio, and substantial inter-operator variability. In this work, we evaluate a self-supervised ultrasound foundation model, USF-MAE, for first-trimester fetal heart view classification. USF-MAE is pretrained using masked autoencoding modelling on more than 370,000 unlabelled ultrasound images spanning over 40 anatomical regions and is subsequently fine-tuned for downstream classification. As a proof of concept, the pretrained Vision Transformer encoder was fine-tuned on an open-source dataset of 6,720 first-trimester fetal echocardiography images to classify five categories: aorta, atrioventricular flows, V sign, X sign, and Other. Model performance was benchmarked against supervised convolutional neural network baselines (ResNet-18 and ResNet-50) and a Vision Transformer (ViT-B/16) model pretrained on natural images (ImageNet-1k). All models were trained and evaluated using identical preprocessing, data splits, and optimization protocols. On an independent test set, USF-MAE achieved the highest performance across all evaluation metrics, with 90.57% accuracy, 91.15% precision, 90.57% recall, and 90.71% F1-score. This represents an improvement of +2.03% in accuracy and +1.98% in F1-score compared with the strongest baseline, ResNet-18. The proposed approach demonstrated robust performance without reliance on aggressive image preprocessing or region-of-interest cropping and showed improved discrimination of non-diagnostic frames.

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