Identifying an Egg-Containing Follicle by Displacement Analysis of the Follicle Border

Abstract

The number of births in Japan has been declining over the past few years, and this declining birthrate has become a social problem. An infertility treatment known as the in-vitro fertilization (IVF) has been developed as a countermeasure, in which a doctor visually confirms the follicles through an ultrasonogram, extracts them one by one to check whether they have eggs, and performs artificial insemination. As, the presence of the egg cannot be confirmed from the ultrasonogram, it is often observed that follicles that do not contain eggs are unnecessarily extracted. Therefore, this study effectively determines the presence or the absence of an egg by analyzing the displacement of the follicle border. First, the candidate points for the follicle border are determined, and then the candidate points that are unlikely to be the border points are removed. The border is estimated after extracting the candidate points of the border using the difference in the brightness values near the border. The presence or absence of the egg is determined based on the displacement of the border with respect to the initial centroid. The accuracy of this method can be improved by increasing the amount of data in a future study.