Hemorrhage and aortic aneurysm detection in the abdomen using three-dimensional ultrasound imaging

In military combat operations and emergency situations, one-third of all trauma deaths occur in the first 15 minutes after injury due to undetected/uncontrolled internal hemorrhage. If the amount of bleeding volume is expanding by 100 ml in a period of 10 minutes, the patient will die of internal bleeding within three hours unless proper treatment is instituted. Other modalities and techniques are available for internal hemorrhage detection in the clinic, but are either expensive or invasive. This project introduces a method of identifying internal hemorrhage using a low cost, portable 3D ultrasound imaging device.; Two volume measurements of the fluid in the peritoneal sac taken over a time interval can be used to determine whether internal bleeding has occurred and whether the bleeding is continuing by measuring the difference between the two volumes. Multiple 3D data sets can be acquired with a 3D mechanical scanner for the patient's abdomen using templates, so that the position and orientation informations of each 3D data set can be established. The fluid volume of each 3D data set is measured from the manual outlining of the fluid border. By subtracting the overlapped volume using the position and orientation information from each other, the entire volume of the fluid in the abdomen can be calculated without over or under estimation.; Fluid in the abdomen can be moved from location to location due to the patient's position for an examination. The optimum position for fluid measurement is investigated by varying patients' positions to allow fluid to gather in significant pouches to different degrees.; A patient's movement or aortic pulsatility degrades the reconstructed image in many modalities. A CT image reconstruction simulation shows the possible image error due to the aortic pulsatility and movement. The data from the 3D scanner, used in this project, includes the oversampled area at the center of 3D data set. The data of the oversampled area is used to compensate motion error in the image.; This project also introduces a method to detect and measure an abdominal aortic aneurysm using this 3D imaging technique.