Automated Gender Detection in an Ultrasound Image Using Object Recognition

The discernment of the gender of the fetus during obstetric ultrasound has played a major in sex-selective abortions. Researchers have shown that in India, there are approximately 50,000 to 100,000 abortions per year. Though there are laws on female feticide, poor awareness and difficulty in implementing technological solutions has made it difficult to effectively dissuade such practice. In the current scenario, B-scans are displayed on monitor screens in real time, which can lead to the unnecessary display of frames that reveal the gender of the fetus. This workflow adds undue burden on the operator to take further precautions to prevent leak of the gender information. Our work not only focuses on automatically detecting ultrasound frames that contain gender but also identify the specific region of the frame that indicated the gender, so that it can be obscured during real-time display.