HC18: Automated Fetal Head Circumference Measurement

Original paper | Grand Challenge | Zenodo

Overview

HC18 is a 2D ultrasound dataset for fetal head segmentation and circumference measurement, released as part of the HC18 Grand Challenge. It contains 1,334 standardized planes of the fetal head acquired from 551 pregnant women at Radboud UMC (Nijmegen, NL) between May 2014 and May 2015.

Splits

• train (999): images + ellipse-outline annotations + per-image pixel size + ground-truth head circumference (mm)
• test (335): images + per-image pixel size (no annotations released; ground truth held by challenge organizers)

Schema

train:

column	type	description
image	Image	800x540 grayscale ultrasound
mask	Image	800x540 binary (0/255) flood-filled segmentation mask
outline	Image	800x540 binary 1-pixel ellipse outline as shipped
filename	str	original filename, e.g. 000_HC.png
subject_id	int	subject ID (0..805)
frame_idx	int	frame index for multi-frame subjects (1..4)
pixel_size_mm	float	pixel size in millimeters
head_circumference_mm	float	ground-truth head circumference (mm)

test (same schema as train; held-out fields are None):

column	type	description
image	Image	800x540 grayscale ultrasound
mask	Image / None	always None (test masks are held by challenge organizers)
outline	Image / None	always None
filename	str	original filename
subject_id	int	parsed from filename
frame_idx	int	parsed from filename (all 1 for test)
pixel_size_mm	float	pixel size in millimeters
head_circumference_mm	float / None	always None (held-out ground truth)

Mask Format

The original annotations shipped with the dataset are 1-pixel-wide ellipse outlines (rings), not filled regions. The mask column is generated by flood-filling the outline interior using scipy.ndimage.binary_fill_holes — the standard preprocessing step described in the V-Net, Res-U-Net, and Mask-R^2 CNN papers. The original outline is preserved as the outline column.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0).

Citation

van den Heuvel, T.L.A., de Bruijn, D., de Korte, C.L., van Ginneken, B.
Automated measurement of fetal head circumference using 2D ultrasound images.
PLoS ONE 13(8): e0200412 (2018).