| Recently, growing attention in extended field-of-view (EFOV) for medical ultrasound (US)has led to a rapid progress of the development of US EFOV techniques. At present, US EFOVtechniques can be classified into three categories:2-Dimensional (2D) US EFOV,3-Dimensional (3D) US and3D US EFOV. These three types of techniques have their ownadvantages and disadvantages. In this study, we propose2.5-Dimensional (2.5D) US EFOVinnovatively, which can combine all the advantages of these US EFOV techniques mentionedabove, meanwhile, overcomes all the shortcomings of them. An electromagnetic measurementsystem is used to measure the real-time position and orientation of the ultrasound probe in the3D space via a spatial sensor attached on a linear probe. The probe is asked to sweep in thegeneral lateral direction over a region of interest to obtain a set of B-sans. A novel imagecutting algorithm is brought forward to reconstruct a extend image from the set of B-scans.Finally, the extend image is rendered in3D spaces by surface rendering technology based ontexture mapping technique. In-vitro experiments demonstrate that the extend images obtainedby2.5D US EFOV system can show anatomical structures of scanning regions accurately.The overall average errors for the distance and angle measurements are0.0590.038cm and0.7590.443degree, respectively. The average error for the distance and angle measurementsare0.882%0.439%and1.817%0.659%, respectively. Meanwhile,2.5D US EFOV systemonly uses2.46s to reconstruct a extend image from typical321B-scans images. In-vivocontrast experiments demonstrate that2.5D US EFOV system can not only obtain extendimages from the real musculoskeletal body parts of the adult subjects (such as forearm, thigh,spine and so on) successfully, but also overcome the shortage of the existing technology well. It is believed that such a brand new technique will have many applications in the assessmentof musculoskeletal issues because of its great improvement. |
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