PFP-LHCINCA: Pyramidal Fixed-Size Patch-Based Feature Extraction and Chi-Square Iterative Neighborhood Component Analysis for Automated Fetal Sex Classification on Ultrasound Images

OBJECTIVES: Fetal sex determination with ultrasound (US) examination is indicated in pregnancies at risk of X-linked genetic disorders or ambiguous genitalia. However, misdiagnoses often arise due to operator inexperience and technical difficulties while acquiring diagnostic images. We aimed to develop an efficient automated US-based fetal sex classification model that can facilitate efficient screening and reduce misclassification. METHODS: We have developed a novel feature engineering model termed PFP-LHCINCA that employs pyramidal fixed-size patch generation with average pooling-based image decomposition, handcrafted feature extraction based on local phase quantization (LPQ), and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) to extract directional and textural features and used Chi-square iterative neighborhood component analysis feature selection (CINCA), which iteratively selects the most informative feature vector for each image that minimizes calculated feature parameter-derived k-nearest neighbor-based misclassification rates. The model was trained and tested on a sizeable expert-labeled dataset comprising 339 males' and 332 females' fetal US images. One transverse fetal US image per subject zoomed to the genital area and standardized to 256 × 256 size was used for analysis. Fetal sex was annotated by experts on US images and confirmed postnatally. RESULTS: Standard model performance metrics were compared using five shallow classifiers—k-nearest neighbor (kNN), decision tree, naïve Bayes, linear discriminant, and support vector machine (SVM)—with the hyperparameters tuned using a Bayesian optimizer. The PFP-LHCINCA model achieved a sex classification accuracy of ≥88% with all five classifiers and the best accuracy rates (>98%) with kNN and SVM classifiers. CONCLUSIONS: US-based fetal sex classification is feasible and accurate using the presented PFP-LHCINCA model. The salutary results support its clinical use for fetal US image screening for sex classification. The model architecture can be modified into deep learning models for training larger datasets.