SPATIAL COMPOUNDING OF 3-D ULTRASOUND IMAGES
Robert Rohling, Andrew Gee and Laurence Berman
October 1996
One of the most promising applications of 3-D ultrasound lies in the visualisation and volume estimation of internal 3-D structures. Unfortunately, the quality of the ultrasound data can be severely degraded by artifacts, especially speckle, making automatic analysis of the 3-D data sets very difficult. In this paper we investigate the use of 3-D spatial compounding to reduce speckle. We develop a new statistical theory to predict the improvement in signal to noise ratio with increased levels of compounding, and verify the predictions empirically. We also investigate how registration errors can affect automatic volume estimation of structures within the compounded 3-D data set. Having established the need to correct these errors, we present a novel reconstruction algorithm which uses landmarks to accurately register each B-scan as it is inserted into the voxel array. In a series of in-vitro and in-vivo trials, we demonstrate that 3-D spatial compounding is very effective for improving the signal to noise ratio, but correction of registration errors is essential.
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