# AnomExpert: Identifying and Selecting Anatomical Planes for Prenatal Ultrasound Anomaly Diagnosis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13409 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13409/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [Additive MIL: Intrinsically Interpretable Multiple Instance Learning for Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01794/) (2022)
- [Detecting Heart Disease from Multi-View Ultrasound Images via Supervised Attention Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00003/) (2023)
- [Ordinal Multiple-instance Learning for Ulcerative Colitis Severity Estimation with Selective Aggregated Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14750/) (2024)
- [Mamba2MIL: State Space Duality Based Multiple Instance Learning for Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15032/) (2024)
- [Medical-Knowledge Driven Multiple Instance Learning for Classifying Severe Abdominal Anomalies on Prenatal Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01401/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Life-limiting congenital anomalies require accurate prenatal diagnosis for appropriate clinical decision-making. Prenatal ultrasound (US) examinations involve multiple anatomical planes, and diagnosis depends on identifying anatomical planes and selecting diagnostically relevant planes for each anomaly. Existing automated methods either rely on plane-level annotations or aggregate heterogeneous images without explicitly modeling these diagnostic capabilities. We propose AnomExpert, a prototype-driven framework for prenatal US anomaly diagnosis using only case-level supervision. AnomExpert introduces learnable plane prototypes to organize unordered images into latent representations corresponding to anatomical planes without requiring plane annotations. A disease-aware sparse selection mechanism further selects diagnostically relevant planes for each anomaly. Experiments on a multi-center dataset of 3,654 cases show that AnomExpert consistently outperforms nine representative multi-instance learning methods. Using a ViT-small backbone, it achieves 86.9% accuracy and 84.2% F1-score while maintaining parameter efficiency. These findings indicate that modeling anatomical plane identification and disease-specific plane selection improves weakly supervised multi-plane prenatal US anomaly classification. The code is available at https://github.com/TIanCat/AnomExpert.
