Improving Preterm Infants’ Joint Detection in Depth Images Via Dense Convolutional Neural Networks

Preterm infants' spontaneous motility is a valuable diagnostic and prognostic index of motor and cognitive impairments. Despite being recognized as crucial, preterm infant's movement assessment is mostly based on clinicians' visual inspection. The aim of this work is to present a 2D dense convolutional neural network (denseCNN) to detect preterm infant's joints in depth images acquired in neonatal intensive care units. The denseCNN allows to improve the performance of our previous model in the detection of joints and joint connections, reaching a median recall value equal to 0.839. With a view to monitor preterm infants in a scenario where computational resources are scarce, we tested the architecture on a mid-range laptop. The prediction occurs in real-time (0.014 s per image), opening up the possibility of integrating such monitoring system in a domestic environment.