AccScience Publishing / IJB / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/IJB025200192
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Early Access

Three-dimensional fast reconstruction in fetal ultrasound imaging using artificial intelligence techniques and medical 3D printing

Wenjuan Zhang1† Jiahe Liang2,3,4† Linbin Lai1† Zewen Zhang1 Yitong Guo2† Na Hou2† Zekai Zhang2 Zhuojun Mao2 Tiesheng Cao2 Yu Li5 Lijun Yuan2* Airong Qian1*
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1 Lab for Bone Metabolism, Xi’an Key Laboratory of Special Medicine and Health Engineering, Key Lab for Space Bio sciences and Biotechnology, Research Center for Special Medicine and Health Systems Engineering, NPU-UAB Joint Laboratory for Bone Metabolism, School of Life Sciences, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China
2 Department of Ultrasound Diagnosis, Tangdu Hospital, Airforce Military Medical University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China
3 State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China
4 NMPA Key Laboratory for Research and Evaluation of Additive Manufacturing Medical Devices, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China.
5 Xi’an Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, Institute of Medical Research, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China
†These authors contributed equally to this work.
Received: 12 May 2025 | Accepted: 1 June 2025 | Published online: 3 June 2025
(This article belongs to the Special Issue 3D-Printed Biomedical Devices)
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Congenital heart disease (CHD) has been one of the most serious problems in newborns. For fetal heart health care, 3D modeling and printing technology has been adopted in diagnosis of CHD during antenatal care. However, the development of 3D printing techniques and their applications in clinic have been hindered by the manually processing of ultrasound (US) volume data in clinical practice. To overcome this problem, we present an interactive semi-automatic method based on deep learning that uses manually processing results from expert sonographers for training. The accuracy, interpretability, and variability of the performances were evaluated on the validation set demonstrated that, compared with a physician with three years’ experience, Faster-RCNN-based Threshold (FRT) had achieved better performance on outflow tracts view (OTV) and three-vessel view (TVV). No significant difference was found among the clinical evaluation values, in proportion, measured from the model rebuilt by FRT and that from US volume data. Furthermore, reconstruction time of fetal heart blood pool model was reduced from approximately 5 hours to 5 minutes. Our results showed that deep learning has the ability to process US data accurately, representing an important step towards the reconstruction of the fetal heart digital model, which may make huge progress in clinical diagnosis and treatment of CHD during pregnancy.

Keywords
Deep learning
Three-dimensional printing technology
Reconstruction of ultrasound imaging data
Congenital heart disease
Funding
This work was supported by the Key Research and Development Project of Shaanxi Province under No. 2021LLRH-08.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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International Journal of Bioprinting, Electronic ISSN: 2424-8002 Print ISSN: 2424-7723, Published by AccScience Publishing