Placental Assessment and Fetal Growth Monitoring

The placenta serves as the lifeline between mother and fetus, mediating oxygen and nutrient exchange, waste removal and hormone production. Assessment of placental structure and function is central to identifying risks such as fetal growth restriction, pre-eclampsia and stillbirth. Ultrasonography remains the cornerstone of antenatal monitoring, providing measurements of placental thickness, diameter, vascular indices and volumetric parameters. Doppler studies of uterine and umbilical arteries offer real-time insight into utero-placental blood flow. Advances in magnetic resonance imaging and machine learning hold promise for detailed tissue characterisation and automated delineation. Fetal growth monitoring relies on biometric parameters—biparietal diameter, head circumference, abdominal circumference and femur length—interpreted against gestational age. Integration of placental and fetal metrics enhances early detection of at-risk pregnancies and guides tailored obstetric management worldwide.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have harnessed deep learning to improve the segmentation and classification of placental structures on ultrasound. A multi-centre collaboration developed a convolutional neural network trained on thousands of annotated images, achieving an intersection over union score approaching expert-level delineation of the placenta across diverse patient populations. The model reliably identified placenta previa and characterised placental boundaries, even when deployed on external datasets from different healthcare settings. Such tools promise standardisation of image acquisition, reduction of operator variability and early detection of placental dysfunction.

Placental Assessment and Fetal Growth Monitoring publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in placental assessment and fetal growth monitoring across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

2D placental biometry: Ultrasonic measurement of placental dimensions in two planes, including basal and chorionic plates and maximal thickness.

3D placental volume: Volumetric assessment of the entire placental mass using three-dimensional ultrasound reconstruction.

Intersection over union (IoU): A metric used in image analysis to quantify the overlap between predicted segmentation and reference annotation.

Small for gestational age (SGA): A classification for neonates whose birth weight falls below the 10th percentile for their gestational age.

References

1. Multi-centre deep learning for placenta segmentation in obstetric ultrasound with multi-observer and cross-country generalization. Scientific Reports (2023).
2. Reference Ranges of 2-Dimensional Placental Biometry and 3-Dimensional Placental Volume between 11 and 14 Weeks of Gestation. Diagnostics (2024).
3. Ultrasound Evaluation of Placental Thickness: Insights From an Observational Study and Implications for Fetal Growth Assessment. Cureus (2024).