RAPID REGISTRATION FOR WIDE FIELD-OF-VIEW FREEHAND 3D ULTRASOUND
A.H. Gee, G.M. Treece, R.W. Prager, C.J.C. Cash and L. Berman
January 2003
A freehand scanning protocol is the only way to acquire arbitrary large volumes of 3D ultrasound data. For some applications, multiple freehand sweeps are required to cover the area of interest. Aligning these multiple sweeps is difficult, typically requiring nonrigid image-based registration as well as the readings from the spatial locator attached to the ultrasound probe. Conventionally, nonrigid warps are achieved through general elastic spline deformations, which are expensive to compute and difficult to constrain. This paper presents an alternative registration technique, where the warp's degrees of freedom are carefully linked to the mechanics of the freehand scanning process. The technique is assessed through an extensive series of in vivo experiments, which reveal a registration precision of a few pixels with comparatively little computational load.
[4.4 MBytes PDF, 21 pages]
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