  To improve the performance of most neuroimiage analysis pipelines, brain
extraction is used as a fundamental first step in the image processing. But in
the case of fetal brain development, there is a need for a reliable US-specific
tool. In this work we propose a fully automated 3D CNN approach to fetal brain
extraction from 3D US clinical volumes with minimal preprocessing. Our method
accurately and reliably extracts the brain regardless of the large data
variation inherent in this imaging modality. It also performs consistently
throughout a gestational age range between 14 and 31 weeks, regardless of the
pose variation of the subject, the scale, and even partial feature-obstruction
in the image, outperforming all current alternatives.
