| This research proposes the development of a robotic-controlled ultrasound imaging system for breast cancer screening. The system aims to create a 3D volume model of a breast phantom from ultrasound tomograms. Traditional ultrasound imaging systems are large machines that are not easily transportable in and out of doctors' offices. Further, ultrasound images suffer from speckle noise that is inherent in every image and degrades the image resolution of anatomical structures. While a radiologist obtains an ultrasound tomogram, position and orientation of the transducer must be known for accurate 3D volume construction. This is difficult with traditional systems without a tracking system. The proposed work has three specific aims to address these issues. The first aim will develop the software platform for image acquisition through precise robotic control and network communication. The second aim is to perform an analysis and evaluation of wavelet-based thresholding schemes for speckle and multiplicative noise reduction. This work will study the image's multiresolution details, and sparse representations from wavelet coefficients. The third aim will develop an algorithm for constructing a 3D model from 2D ultrasound tomograms positioned by a robotic arm. |
