# Cross-Modal Ultrasound-MRI Learning for Fetal Brain Ventricular Volumetry and Abnormality Screening

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14763 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14763/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
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- [MedSAM2: Segment Anything in 3D Medical Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03600/) (2025)
- [SonoNet: Real-Time Detection and Localisation of Fetal Standard Scan Planes in Freehand Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05601/) (2016)
- [USFM: A Universal Ultrasound Foundation Model Generalized to Tasks and Organs towards Label Efficient Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00153/) (2023)
- [An automatic multi-tissue human fetal brain segmentation benchmark using the Fetal Tissue Annotation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15526/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything Model for Medical Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14660/) (2023)
- [ChatCAD+: Towards a Universal and Reliable Interactive CAD using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15964/) (2023)
- [FetalCLIP: A Visual-Language Foundation Model for Fetal Ultrasound Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14807/) (2025)
- [Human-level Performance On Automatic Head Biometrics In Fetal Ultrasound Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09102/) (2018)
- [Searching Collaborative Agents for Multi-plane Localization in 3D Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15273/) (2020)
- [EchoJEPA: A Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Echocardiography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02603/) (2026)
- [Fourier Test-time Adaptation with Multi-level Consistency for Robust Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02544/) (2023)
- [General Purpose Image Encoder DINOv2 for Medical Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15687/) (2024)
- [Agent with Warm Start and Adaptive Dynamic Termination for Plane Localization in 3D Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14502/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Assessment of ventriculomegaly (VM) on fetal brain ultrasound relies primarily on measuring lateral ventricular atrial width on standard planes, which is operator-dependent and may not fully reflect the overall ventricular enlargement. Fetal brain MRI provides more reliable volumetric information but is costly and less accessible for routine use. To address these limitations, we propose VIFBA, an ultrasound video-based framework for fetal brain assessment that predicts MRI-derived lateral ventricular volume, classifies VM severity, and identifies potential non-VM fetal brain abnormalities. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we introduce a joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA)-inspired tube latent prediction objective that leverages spatio-temporal coherence in ultrasound videos to enhance representation learning. Second, we develop a contrastive cross-modal alignment strategy that transfers structural information from MRI to ultrasound during training, while requiring ultrasound alone at inference. Third, we augment VIFBA with a training-free vision-language model and retrieval augmentation to verify uncertain predictions and identify potential non-VM fetal brain abnormalities. We validated VIFBA on a large dataset comprising 857 cases (3,196 videos) with paired fetal brain ultrasound and MRI examinations. On held-out test data, VIFBA achieved an MAE of 0.5909 mL and Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.9907 for ventricular volume regression, 0.9400 accuracy for VM severity classification, and an F1 score of 0.7764 for multi-abnormality classification, substantially outperforming single-task baselines, video-based strong competitors, and state-of-the-art foundation models. By enabling MRI-informed volumetric assessment from routine ultrasound alone, VIFBA offers a practical and potentially broadly deployable pathway toward accurate and affordable prenatal brain screening.
