AUTOMATIC REGISTRATION OF 3-D ULTRASOUND IMAGES
Rohling, R., Gee, A. and Berman, L.
May 1997
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 and 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 improve the quality of the ultrasound data. This involves imaging the region of interest repeatedly from a variety of insonation angles, and averaging the resulting data sets. For accurate compounding, it is important to register the multiple data sets precisely. We show how state-of-the-art techniques, developed elsewhere for multimodal CT to MRI registration, are equally successful with 3-D ultrasound. Results are based on in-vivo examinations of a human gall bladder, demonstrating clearly the superiority of the compounded data. In particular, it is possible to visualise and segment the compounded data using standard software packages developed for CT and MRI. We also demonstrate the accuracy of automatic volume estimates made from the compounded data, compared with labour-intensive, manual estimates from the uncompounded data. The registration algorithm also has applications in intra- and inter-patient comparitive studies.
If you have difficulty viewing files that end '.gz'
,
which are gzip compressed, then you may be able to find
tools to uncompress them at the gzip
web site.
If you have difficulty viewing files that are in PostScript, (ending
'.ps'
or '.ps.gz'
), then you may be able to
find tools to view them at
the gsview
web site.
We have attempted to provide automatically generated PDF copies of documents for which only PostScript versions have previously been available. These are clearly marked in the database - due to the nature of the automatic conversion process, they are likely to be badly aliased when viewed at default resolution on screen by acroread.