Sangeeta Khare, Hulesh Mandle, Manik Chatterjee, Bichitrananda Roul, Deepti Gautam
BACKGROUND The growth of the human fetus is a complex process resulting in an increase in size over time and has been the subject of extensive study. Before the advent of ultrasound evaluation, physicians interested in the growth process of the fetus could only look at the infant at delivery and infer as to what happened in utero. Based on these observations, clinicians were able to categorize fetuses in very general terms on the basis of their age and size. In the second and third trimester of pregnancy the fetus has grown sufficiently in size, so that extreme anatomic details are visualized by ultrasonography. There are a number of structures that can be identified and measured during this time, but the basic foetal measurement we have used to estimate age with ultrasound are- biparietal diameter (BPD) and femur length (FL). MATERIALS AND METHODS This study was performed in the Department of Anatomy in close association with the Department of Radiodiagnosis, Pt. J.N.M. Medical College, Raipur, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Memorial Hospital, Raipur (C.G.). The ultrasonographic examination comprised of recording of, Biparietal Diameter (BPD) and Femur Length (FL). The foetal growth parameters i.e. BPD and femur length FL of every patient were measured serially using real time ultrasonographic examination. RESULTS The means of all measurement were tabulated and were compared individually with western normograms. CONCLUSION The accuracy of the individual parameter for different weeks of gestation was noted. This accuracy indicated that, the correctly diagnosed gestational age by sonographic parameters are not equally homologous with known menstrual age. The specificity and sensitivity of BPD and FL was found to be more appropriate in predicting gestational age in second trimester and its reliability decreases in third trimester.
