FetSelect: Task-Specific Architectures and Self-Supervised Learning for Automated Fetal Ultrasound Frame Selection

Abstract

Automated frame selection for fetal biometry remains under addressed, with most prior work targeting generic quality assessment or downstream measurement pipelines that assume suitable frames are available. We introduce FetSelect, a task-specific framework that pairs a frozen vision foundation backbone with a hybrid multi-head design: a Task-Gated classification head and a Detection-derived quality head combined via learned fusion. We curate 6,486 expert-labeled frames across four targets: Crown-Rump Length (CRL), Nuchal Translucency (NT), Nasal Bone (NB), and Scalebar, and adapt the backbone with BYOL pretraining on 19,019 unlabeled images. On a held-out test set (974 frames), FetSelect achieves mean AUROC 0.956 and mean correlation 0.818 with expert quality annotations. Ablations confirm that hybrid fusion surpasses single-head variants, and ultrasound-specific self-supervision yields consistent gains. Evaluation on external clinical videos and 509 external CRL images demonstrates task-specific discrimination.