Feasibility of a Standardised Mid‐Trimester Ultrasound Protocol: A National Multicenter Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Evaluate the feasibility and quality of a national standardised mid-trimester ultrasound protocol using a consensus-based quality assessment (QA) scoring system. DESIGN: Multicenter prospective observational 'FLASH' study. SETTING: (i) Assessing the feasibility of a standardised protocol of 24 views at the mid-trimester scan, with 21 recommended and 3 additional views, in routine practice. (ii) Assessing the quality of these images by evaluating the presence of conformity criteria. (iii) Analysing the reliability between self-assessment and peer-assessment of the images. POPULATION: A total of 440 mid-trimester scans. METHODS: A consensus-based QA scoring system comprising 73 conformity criteria was established with 28 experts using a 3-round Delphi method. Secondly, we asked operators to record 5 consecutive routine mid-trimester scans. Images were analysed by the sonographer themselves and by a qualified expert according to the scoring system. The frequency of recorded images was calculated for each of the views. Factors associated with missing images per scan were evaluated. The robustness of conformity criteria was assessed by reliability between self-evaluation and peer-evaluation. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Based on 9849 images, we observed feasibility of the 21 recommended standardised views for mid-trimester scan ranging from 88.5% to 100%. RESULTS: Most conformity criteria (64/73, 88%) were met in over 90% of cases. Gwet's AC1 correlation between expert evaluation (peer-evaluation) and participant evaluation (self-evaluation) was greater than 0.80 for 70/73 (96%) criteria. CONCLUSION: This large-scale 2-month 'flash' observational study demonstrates the feasibility and quality of a national standardised mid-trimester ultrasound protocol using a consensus-based QA scoring system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".