A fast automatic recognition and location algorithm for fetal genital organs in ultrasound images

Severe sex ratio imbalance at birth is now becoming an important issue in several Asian countries. Its leading immediate cause is prenatal sex-selective abortion following illegal sex identification by ultrasound scanning. In this paper, a fast automatic recognition and location algorithm for fetal genital organs is proposed as an effective method to help prevent ultrasound technicians from unethically and illegally identifying the sex of the fetus. This automatic recognition algorithm can be divided into two stages. In the 'rough' stage, a few pixels in the image, which are likely to represent the genital organs, are automatically chosen as points of interest (POIs) according to certain salient characteristics of fetal genital organs. In the 'fine' stage, a specifically supervised learning framework, which fuses an effective feature data preprocessing mechanism into the multiple classifier architecture, is applied to every POI. The basic classifiers in the framework are selected from three widely used classifiers: radial basis function network, backpropagation network, and support vector machine. The classification results of all the POIs are then synthesized to determine whether the fetal genital organ is present in the image, and to locate the genital organ within the positive image. Experiments were designed and carried out based on an image dataset comprising 658 positive images (images with fetal genital organs) and 500 negative images (images without fetal genital organs). The experimental results showed true positive (TP) and true negative (TN) results from 80.5% (265 from 329) and 83.0% (415 from 500) of samples, respectively. The average computation time was 453 ms per image.

Trauma of the Male Genitals in the Teaching Hospital Sylvanus Olympio of Lome: Lesional and Therapeutic Aspects

Introduction: Trauma of the external male genital organs (TEMGO) is multifaceted and rare. The objective of this work was to provide an overview of these lesions by describing the epidemiology, the diagnostic approach, their therapeutic and prognostic aspects. Materials and Methods: It was a retrospective study carried out over a ten-year period, from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2018. It included male patients, admitted and treated in surgical emergencies and in the urology department of the Sylvanus Olympio Teaching Hospital in Lomé for trauma of male external genital organs. Results: Thirty-five cases had been collected. They had represented 1.5% of urological emergencies. The subjects were young with a mean age of 29.6 ± 3.1 years, with extremes of 18 and 60 years. Trauma to the penis was more frequent and found in 60% of cases, with the mechanism of coitus misstep in 54.3%, leading to a fracture of the penis. Testicular contusions were found in 22.9% of the cases. The ultrasound was performed in 6 patients. Four orchidectomies were performed for an unsustainable testicle found at scrototomy. The postoperative had been simple in all cases. Fifteen patients (42.8%) had been regularly followed on 18 months. Residual testicular pain and mode-rate erectile dysfunction was noted respectively in 3 and 2 patients. Conclusion: TEMGO, although rare, require perfect knowledge for adequate therapeutic decisions, as they can compromise the functional prognosis of concerned organs.