Newlife presented at IEEE UFFC - Joint Symposium 2024 in Taipei, Taiwan

Newlife project received international exposure in Taiwan when Beatrice Federici from our partner Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) delivered a presentation entitled: "Active Inference for Closed-loop Fetal Doppler Ultrasound" at an international IEEE UFFC joint symposium (Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control Society) on the 28th September, 2024. 

Summary of the work:

Doppler ultrasound is widely used to monitor fetal heart rate during labor and pregnancy, but it is highly sensitive to fetal and maternal movements, which can cause the displacement of the fetal heart with respect to the ultrasound beam, reducing the Doppler signal-to-noise ratio and leading to erratic, noisy, or absent heart rate readings. 

To address this limitation, we propose a closed-loop cognitive ultrasound system that autonomously steers the ultrasound beam to track the fetal heart position. We augment a conventional Doppler ultrasound system with a rational agent that infers the fetal heart position based on the measured power Doppler signal and sequentially adjusts the transmit beam steering angle to minimize the positional uncertainty. The fetal heart rate is then computed using the Doppler signal at the estimated fetal heart position.

Our results show that the proposed cognitive system can accurately estimate the heart rate in the presence of strong noise and substantial target movement.