Jochen F Krücker | PubMed Health

PubMed2004

Sound speed estimation using automatic ultrasound image registration.

A mismatch between the sound speed assumed for beamforming and scan conversion and the true sound speed in the tissue to be imaged can lead to significant defocusing and some geometric distortions in ultrasound images. A method is presented for estimating the average sound speed based on detection of these distortions using automatic registration of overlapping, electronically steered images. An acrylamide gel phantom containing vaporized dodecafluoropentane droplets as point targets was constructed to evaluate the technique. Good agreement (rms deviation <0.4%) was found between the sound speeds measured in the phantom using a reference pulse-echo technique and the image-based sound speed estimates. A significant improvement in accuracy (rms deviation <0.1%) was achieved by including the simulated sound field of the probe rather than assuming straight acoustic beams and propagation according to ray acoustics.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2002

Rapid elastic image registration for 3-D ultrasound.

A Subvolume-based algorithm for elastic Ultrasound REgistration (SURE) was developed and evaluated. Designed primarily to improve spatial resolution in three-dimensional compound imaging, the algorithm registers individual image volumes nonlinearly before combination into compound volumes. SURE works in one or two stages, optionally using MIAMI Fuse software first to determine a global affine registration before iteratively dividing the volume into subvolumes and computing local rigid registrations in the second stage. Connectivity of the entire volume is ensured by global interpolation using thin-plate splines after each iteration. The performance of SURE was quantified in 20 synthetically deformed in vivo ultrasound volumes, and in two phantom scans, one of which was distorted at acquisition by placing an aberrating layer in the sound path. The aberrating layer was designed to induce beam aberrations reported for the female breast. Synthetic deformations of 1.5-2.5 mm were reduced by over 85% when SURE was applied to register the distorted image volumes with the original ones. Registration times were below 5 min on a 500-MHz CPU for an average data set size of 13 MB. In the aberrated phantom scans, SURE reduced the average deformation between the two volumes from 1.01 to 0.30 mm. This was a statistically significant (P = 0.01) improvement over rigid and affine registration transformations, which produced reductions to 0.59 and 0.50 mm, respectively.

Algorithms↗