An efficient algorithm is presented for estimating interframe distances in a 2D frame sequence acquired by freehand scanning for the reconstruction of a 3D ultrasound image. Since interframe distances in a 2D frame sequence obtained with a hand-held ultrasound probe are not uniform, a 3D image directly reconstructed from such 2D data can substantially deviate from the real form of the human organs. Accordingly, to estimate the interframe distances in a 2D frame sequence, block-based lateral correlation functions are determined in each frame, plus it is also assumed that each block-based lateral correlation function is identical to the interframe correlation function of the block. Based on this assumption, the interframe distance between each image block and the corresponding block of the adjacent frame is then estimated. Finally, the interframe distance of each adjacent frame is estimated by averaging the estimated block-wise interframe distances. Experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm was effective in estimating the interframe distances of the test sequences and the 3D images reconstructed using the proposed method were nearly identical to the original ones.

Date Published: 13 April 2001
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 4298, Three-Dimensional Image Capture and Applications IV, (13 April 2001); doi: 10.1117/12.424906

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4298:
Three-Dimensional Image Capture and Applications IV
Brian D. Corner; Joseph H. Nurre; Roy P. Pargas, Editor(s)