Cost-Efficient Light-Weight YOLO V5_s for Whole Fetus Detection in Early-Stage Ultrasound Scans
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31357/ait.v4i02.8026Keywords:
Faster R-CNN, fetal ultrasound, first trimester, remote monitoring, whole fetus, YOLOAbstract
Routine medical Ultrasound (US) scans are recommended for expectant mothers to monitor the health and growth of the fetus. However, expectant mothers in rural areas of developing and underdeveloped countries face difficulties in receiving timely scans due to a lack of expertise and facilities. Consequently, maternal and fetal deaths occur at higher rates in these countries, especially in the first trimester. Novel concepts such as Virtual Doctors, Hospital to Home, self- scans and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) may address the aforementioned problem effectively. Therefore,
computational-efficient algorithms which support low-end smart devices should be introduced to assist expectant mothers in rural areas to provide comfortable and timely fetal scans. In light of the above, this paper discusses computationally efficient YOLO V5_s for fetal detection in first-trimester ultrasound images using a highly diverse dataset including abnormal and multiple pregnancies. The implemented model was compared with five benchmark detection models, namely, ResNet-50 and MobileNet-based faster R-CNN, YOLO-n, YOLO-m and YOLO-l. YOLO was comparatively better than faster R-CNN. Even though YOLO-n is the most computationally inexpensive model, its mAP is 0.709, which is comparatively low, hence cannot be applied to the clinical set-up. YOLO-l model has the best performance with F-1 score and mAP of 0.978 and 0.751, respectively. However, YOLO-s has also achieved a F-1 score of 0.979 with a mAP 0.734. Therefore, a subjective test was conducted to verify using YOLO-s in the clinical set-up with five experts in the field with more than five years of experience. The subjective analysis test, assessed through Fleiss Kappa, suggests substantial agreement beyond chance (κ = 0.69), while the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) indicates modest reliability (ICC = 0.7). The findings endorse the application of YOLO-s for real-time detection of whole fetuses in the first trimester with reduced computational complexity with further validation.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
License
Copyright (c) 2025 U.B. Balagalla, O.V. Jayawardane, J.V.D. Jayasooriya, C. De Alwis, A. Subasinghe

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The Authors hold the copyright of their manuscripts, and all articles are circulated under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, as long as that the original work is properly cited.
The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, and so forth in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations. The authors are responsible for securing any permissions needed for the reuse of copyrighted materials included in the manuscript.