Maternal-fetal US is the primary imaging modality for monitoring fetal development, yet accurate automated segmentation remains challenging due to the scarcity of pixel-level annotations. To address this issue, we propose DACL, a semi-supervised framework for robust fetal US image segmentation. DACL jointly trains a deployment-oriented lightweight convolutional network (1.47\thinsp\mathrm{M} parameters) and a Transformer-based network, leveraging labeled data for supervised learning and unlabeled data via CPS. To enhance prediction stability, we introduce a dual-agreement consistency loss that couples pixel-wise probabilistic divergence with entropy-guided confidence alignment. Unlike conventional CPS methods that enforce agreement only at the prediction level, DACL explicitly regularizes both distributional alignment and uncertainty, thereby suppressing unreliable pseudo-labels and enabling stable cross-architecture pseudo-label learning under extreme annotation scarcity. Furthermore, an interpolation-based consistency strategy using mixup is applied to unlabeled samples to enhance robustness. Under 5% labeled data, DACL improves Dice by up to 2.77% and reduces HD95 by up to 14.69 mm compared with the strongest recent semi-supervised methods, demonstrating significant improvements in boundary accuracy on both fetal head and abdomen datasets. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of agreement-based consistency learning for annotation-efficient fetal US segmentation. Our code is on GitHub.
We present a semi-supervised framework for joint segmentation and classification of fetal cardiac ultrasound images. Built upon the EchoCare multi-task backbone, our method integrates SAM-Med2D for boundary refinement and leverages DINOv3 to enhance pseudo-label quality. We introduce view-specific hard masking along with a two-stage optimization strategy: an EMA phase to consolidate segmentation capabilities, followed by a Classification Fine-Tuning phase that freezes segmentation parameters and resets the classification head to recover classification performance without compromising segmentation gains. Evaluated on the FETUS 2026 leaderboard, our method achieves a Dice Similarity Coefficient at 79.99%, Normalized Surface Distance at 61.62%, and F1-score at 41.20%, validating the effectiveness of our approach for prenatal congenital heart disease screening. Source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/2826056177/zcst_fetus2026.
Automated fetal head segmentation in ultrasound images is critical for accurate biometric measurements in prenatal care. While existing deep learning approaches have achieved a reasonable performance, they struggle with issues like low contrast, noise, and complex anatomical boundaries which are inherent to ultrasound imaging. This paper presents Attention-ResUNet. It is a novel architecture that synergistically combines residual learning with multi-scale attention mechanisms in order to achieve enhanced fetal head segmentation. Our approach integrates attention gates at four decoder levels to focus selectively on anatomically relevant regions while suppressing the background noise, and complemented by residual connections which facilitates gradient flow and feature reuse. Extensive evaluation on the HC18 Challenge dataset where n = 200 demonstrates that Attention ResUNet achieves a superior performance with a mean Dice score of 99.30 +/- 0.14% against similar architectures. It significantly outperforms five baseline architectures including ResUNet (99.26%), Attention U-Net (98.79%), Swin U-Net (98.60%), Standard U-Net (98.58%), and U-Net++ (97.46%). Through statistical analysis we confirm highly significant improvements (p < 0.001) with effect sizes that range from 0.230 to 13.159 (Cohen's d). Using Saliency map analysis, we reveal that our architecture produces highly concentrated, anatomically consistent activation patterns, which demonstrate an enhanced interpretability which is crucial for clinical deployment. The proposed method establishes a new state of the art performance for automated fetal head segmentation whilst maintaining computational efficiency with 14.7M parameters and a 45 GFLOPs inference cost. Code repository: https://github.com/Ammar-ss
Intelligent fetal ultrasound (US) interpretation is crucial for prenatal diagnosis, but high annotation costs and operator-induced variance make unsupervised pre-training a highly promising paradigm. However, existing pre-training methods largely ignore US-specific characteristics -- severe data redundancy, fan-shaped locality, and polar coordinate beamforming -- limiting their effectiveness in downstream tasks. To address this, we propose PolarMAE, a novel and efficient pre-training framework tailored for US images. Specifically, to mitigate continuous scanning redundancy, we introduce a Progressive Visual-Semantic Screening (PVSS) that adaptively extracts high-value samples, significantly boosting pre-training efficiency. Furthermore, we design an Acoustic-Bounded Region Constraint (ABRC) to accommodate US locality, forcing the model to focus strictly on valid acoustic regions rather than invalid dark backgrounds. Finally, leveraging the beamforming prior and local details, we propose a Polar-Texture Collaborative Masking (PTCM), enabling the model to capture underlying radial imaging patterns and critical tissue structures. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and downstream interpretation tasks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with strong pre-training scalability and efficiency.