An investigation into the feasibility of fetal lung maturity prediction using statistical textural features

Fetal lung and liver tissues were examined by ultrasound in 240 subjects during 24 to 38 weeks of gestational age in order to investigate the feasibility of predicting the maturity of the lung from the textural features of sonograms. A region of interest of 64 X 64 pixels is used for extracting textural features. Since the histological properties of the liver are claimed to remain constant with respect to gestational age, features obtained from the lung region are compared with those from liver. Though the mean values of some of the features show a specific trend with respect to gestation age, the variance is too high to guarantee definite prediction of the gestational age. Thus, we restricted our purview to an investigation into the feasibility of fetal lung maturity prediction using statistical textural features. Out of 64 features extracted, those features that are correlated with gestation age and less computationally intensive are selected. The results of our study show that the sonographic features hold some promise in determining whether the fetal lung is mature or immature.