Non-planar reslicing for freeh and 3D ultrasound

Abstract

Any-plane slicing is a visualisation technique common to many medical imaging modalities, including 3D ultrasound. The acquired data is resampled on a user-specified plane and rendered, usually after some interpolation, on a standard graphics display. In this paper, we motivate and develop non-planar reslicing for freehand 3D ultrasound: the data is resampled not on a flat plane, but a curved surface, which is then unrolled for display on a flat screen. We show how to implement non-planar reslicing in a sequential manner, so the reslice image can be constructed directly from the raw B-scans and positions, without going through an intermediate voxel array stage. Care is taken to ensure that distances measured along lines in the non-planar reslice image are the same as the distances measured along the corresponding curves in 3D space. The resulting tool has interesting clinical applications, made accessible through an effective Graphical User Interface (GUI), which allows the user to specify the required reslice surface rapidly and intuitively. The GUI, and some of the applications, are illustrated in this paper.