Multi-resolution cube propagation for 3D ultrasound image reconstruction
Abstract—3D ultrasound provides physicians with volume rendering of patient ultrasound data. This medical ultrasound technique carries important clinical value in image-guided surgery. However, 3D ultrasound is not widely used because obtaining 3D ultrasound images is difficult and costly, and the technology used is incapable of scanning large-volume organs. This study proposes a novel method for 3D freehand ultrasound reconstruction, which can accurately restore 3D volumes from 2D B-scans through cube propagation. The 3D multi-resolution method creates a 3D volume pyramid and a 3D texture pyramid to preserve the structural and textural details of the imaged volume. Computation efficiency is improved with the 3D Approximate Nearest Neighbors (ANN) search technique, which is proposed to accelerate the nearest-neighbor search through the whole 3D ultrasound volume. Texture information in the texture pyramid is added to the cube distance in the nearest-neighbors searching step to identify suitable nearest neighbors. Experiments performed on clinical and synthetic datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is robust and can achieve quality results in a short execution time relative to current reconstruction techniques.
