Research Of Automatic Scanning And Imaging System For Three-Dimensional Ultrasound

Medical ultrasound imaging has been widely used in clinical practice due to its advantages of being easy-to-use,low-cost and non-radiation.Traditional two-dimensional(2D)ultrasound imaging could only provide cross-sectional information of the tissue,doctors should imagine the three-dimensional(3D)structure of the tissue according to their experience,which affects the objectivity and correctness of the diagnosis.3D ultrasound imaging can well overcome this limitation.It allows viewing an entire structure of tissues in 3D space,extracting arbitrary reslices,measuring the volume of lesions,which make the diagnostic result more accurate.The doctors at the sonography department often need to hold the ultrasound probe for a long time to examine a large number of patients,long-term repetitive operation and application of pressure lead to musculoskeletal deceases easily.In order to reduce the labor burden of the doctor and improve the efficiency of ultrasound diagnosis,more and more robot-assisted ultrasound scanning systems have been developed,making ultrasound imaging more convenient and accurate.However,these systems also have some limitations which need to be overcome.In this study,we proposed a novel automatic scanning and imaging system for 3D ultrasound.The proposed system consisted of the following equipments: Sonix RP,ultrasound probe,industrial personal computer,Kinect,3D translating device,force sensor and data acquisition card.After spatial and temporal calibration,Kinect was used to obtain the depth data and color data of the tissue surface.Based on the data,the 3D contour of the tissue can be determined,and the system can plan the scan range and the scan path of the ultrasound probe.With respect to the scan path,the 3D translating device could drove the ultrasound probe to scan the tissue surface.During the scanning process,the B-scans and their positional information were recorded simultaneously.After scanning,Bezier interpolation algorithm was applied for 3D reconstruction.3D visualization and image analysis could be realized.In order to verify the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed system,quantitative and qualitative experiments were conducted.In quantitative experiments,to prove the imaging accuracy of the proposed system,the resolution phantom was scanned and the inner targets were measured.Mean and standard deviation were calculated and compared with the real value,the experimental results show that the error of volume measurement was less than 0.8%,indicating high imaging accuracy of the proposed system.In qualitative experiments,breast phantom,thyroid phantom,lumbar phantom,fetus phantom and human forearm were scanned,3D reconstruction was realized and orthogonal slices were extracted.The experimental results show that the proposed system is capable of automatic scanning and imaging for 3D ultrasound,and the proposed system has a certain practical value.