Shadow Estimation For Ultrasound Images Using Auto-Encoding Structures And Synthetic Shadows

Acoustic shadows are common artifacts in medical ultrasound imaging. The shadows are caused by objects that reflect ultrasound such as bones, and they are shown as dark areas in ultrasound images. Detecting such shadows is crucial for assessing the quality of images. This will be a pre-processing for further image processing or recognition aiming computer-aided diagnosis. In this paper, we propose an auto-encoding structure that estimates the shadowed areas and their intensities. The model once splits an input image into an estimated shadow image and an estimated shadow-free image through its encoder and decoder. Then, it combines them to reconstruct the input. By generating plausible synthetic shadows based on relatively coarse domain-specific knowledge on ultrasound images, we can train the model using unlabeled data. If pixel-level labels of the shadows are available, we also utilize them in a semi-supervised fashion. By experiments on ultrasound images for fetal heart diagnosis, we show that our method achieved 0.720 in the DICE score and outperformed conventional image processing methods and a segmentation method based on deep neural networks. The capability of the proposed method on estimating the intensities of shadows and the shadow-free images is also indicated through the experiments.