# Anatomy-Guided Foundation Model Adaptation with Within-Case Prototype Supervision for Standard Plane Detection in Fetal Ultrasound Blind Sweeps

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27051 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27051/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00915/) (2023)
- [ActionFormer: Localizing Moments of Actions with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07925/) (2022)
- [Alpha-CLIP: A CLIP Model Focusing on Wherever You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03818/) (2023)
- [TriDet: Temporal Action Detection with Relative Boundary Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07347/) (2023)
- [SonoNet: Real-Time Detection and Localisation of Fetal Standard Scan Planes in Freehand Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05601/) (2016)
- [CardioMorphNet: Cardiac Motion Prediction Using a Shape-Guided Bayesian Recurrent Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20734/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting the fetal abdominal circumference standard plane in low-cost obstetric blind sweeps is a highly imbalanced frame-classification problem: positive frames account for under 3% of a sequence, form short contiguous segments, and are poorly handled by off-the-shelf ultrasound and vision foundation models. We propose AnatoProto, a lightweight sequence-level framework that adapts a frozen BiomedCLIP encoder to fetal blind sweeps through four components: (i) anatomy-weighted spatial pooling that uses nnU-Net abdominal-region probabilities as a spatial prior to reweight BiomedCLIP patch tokens, so frozen semantic features are aggregated onto anatomically meaningful regions; (ii) a within-case prototype loss that pulls each frame embedding toward the mean of positive frames of the same sweep, exploiting case-level structure unavailable at the frame level; (iii) a three-stage cascade refinement (frame->segment->case-level rejecter) that lifts the prediction unit from noisy frames to structurally-constrained segments; and (iv) a hybrid prediction head that jointly models per-frame stability and inter-frame boundary transitions to suppress boundary false positives. On the ACOUSLIC-AI benchmark, AnatoProto reaches a test F1 of 67.72, outperforming the strongest foundation-model baseline (FetalCLIP + PRS, F1 = 54.52) by +13.20 F1 and the strongest video temporal-action-detection baseline (TriDet + PRS) by +15.76 F1. A synergy study, backed by embedding geometry and paired-bootstrap confidence intervals, shows that the prototype loss and anatomy-weighted pooling are not additive: applied alone the prototype loss reduces recall by 12 points, but combined with anatomy-weighted pooling it increases recall by 6.5 points -- a sign-flip we trace to the accuracy of the within-case prototype.
