Orientation-driven ultrasound compounding using uncertainty information

Abstract

Compounding 2D ultrasound sweeps into 3D volumes is, due to its cost- and time-efficiency, of great clinical significance in both diagnostic and interventional imaging. However, today's algorithms restrict the sweeps to have homogeneous pressure and a linear trajectory, which limits their use in clinical applications such as breast or musculoskeletal ultrasound where artifacts occur due to soft and uneven surfaces. In this work, we present two techniques to resolve those restrictions by using an orientation-driven approach, first compensating for probe pressure changes and then resolving ambiguities in regions, where multiple ultrasound frames from different acoustic windows overlap. After clustering incoming frames by orientation, we determine the final voxel intensities based on per-pixel uncertainty information. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of our methods shows that these techniques provide reconstructions of superior quality for ultrasound sweeps of inhomogeneous pressure and twisted trajectories. Furthermore, we propose optimizations in the implementation of these techniques towards real-time applications, interactively updating and refining the reconstructed volume. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.