AUTOMATIC REGISTRATION OF 3-D ULTRASOUND IMAGES
Rohling, R., Gee, A. and Berman, L.
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.
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