OBJECTIVE To compare the effectiveness of different screening policies for the antenatal detection of Down's syndrome. DESIGN Retrospective six year survey. SETTING Maternity units of eight districts. PARTICIPANTS Women who completed their pregnancies between 1 January 1994 and 31 December 1999 (155 501 deliveries). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Cases of Down's syndrome identified before 24 wee...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the performance of the locally developed universal Down syndrome screening programme. DESIGN Population-based cohort study in the period July 2010 to June 2011 inclusive. SETTING Four Hong Kong Hospital Authority Departments of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and a central university-based laboratory for maternal serum processing and risk determination. PARTICIPANTS Women...

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of adding outlet views to the four chamber view in routine prenatal ultrasound screening for major congenital heart defects (CHD) as performed by trained sonographers, and to compare the procedure with current practice. Design and setting: Prospective observational study at a London teaching hospital. Participants and methods: 9277 women booked at a sing...

There is extensive evidence that effective screening for major chromosomal abnormalities can be provided in the first trimester of pregnancy. Prospective studies in a total of 200,868 pregnancies, including 871 fetuses with trisomy 21, have demonstrated that increased nuchal translucency can identify 76.8% of fetuses with trisomy 21, which represents a false-positive rate of 4.2%. When fetal nu...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of adding outlet views to the four chamber view in routine prenatal ultrasound screening for major congenital heart defects (CHD) as performed by trained sonographers, and to compare the procedure with current practice. DESIGN AND SETTING Prospective observational study at a London teaching hospital. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS 9277 women booked at a sin...

OBJECTIVE this paper reports an association between an increased Nuchal Translucency (NT) and Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI), a type of skeletal dysplasia. Measurement of fetal NT at 10-14 weeks of gestation is a sensitive and effective screening method for chromosomal abnormalities. METHODS a 35-year- old Caucasian woman in her fourth pregnancy was referred to our clinic for an ultrasound scan...

OBJECTIVE To assess whether extremes in nuchal translucency (NT) thickness measurements at 11-14 weeks of gestation are preceded by departures from normal in early ultrasound biometry or embryonic heart rate in euploid fetuses. METHODS This was a retrospective analysis of data from women with singleton pregnancies examined in early pregnancy between June 2002 and January 2003, who subsequentl...

This paper proposes a fully automatic approach for computing Nuchal Translucency (NT) measurement in an ultrasound scans of the mid-sagittal plane of a fetal head. This is an improvement upon current NT measurement methods which require manual placement of NT measurement points or user-guidance in semi-automatic segmentation of the NT region. The algorithm starts by finding the pose of the feta...