An accurate and effective FMM-based approach for freehand 3D ultrasound reconstruction

Freehand three-dimensional ultrasound imaging is a highly attractive research area because it is capable of volumetric visualization and analysis of tissues and organs. The reconstruction algorithm plays a key role to the construction of three-dimensional ultrasound volume data with higher image quality and faster reconstruction speed. However, a systematic approach to such problem is still missing. A new fast marching method (FMM) for three-dimensional ultrasound volume reconstruction using the tracked and hand-held probe is proposed in this paper. Our reconstruction approach consists of two stages: bin-filling stage and hole-filling stage. Each pixel in the B-scan images is traversed and its intensity value is assigned to its nearest voxel in the bin-filling stage. For the efficient and accurate reconstruction, we present a new hole-filling algorithm based on the fast marching method. Our algorithm advances the interpolation boundary along its normal direction and fills the area closest to known voxel points in first, which ensure that the structural details of image can be preserved. Experimental results on both ultrasonic abdominal phantom and in vivo urinary bladder of human subject and comparisons with some popular algorithms are used to demonstrate its improvement in both reconstruction accuracy and efficiency.