Sensorless Reconstruction of Unconstrained Freehand 3D Ultrasound Data

Abstract 

Freehand 3D ultrasound can be acquired without a position sensor by finding the separations of pairs of frames using information in the images themselves. Previous work has not considered how to reconstruct entirely freehand data, which can exhibit irregularly spaced frames, intersecting frames, nonmonotonic out-of-plane probe motion and significant in-plane motion. This paper presents reconstruction methods that overcome these limitations and are able to robustly reconstruct unconstrained freehand data. The methods are assessed on freehand data sets and compared with reconstructions obtained with a position sensor. (E-mail: rjh80@eng.cam.ac.uk)

Key Words: Freehand 3D ultrasound, Sensorless reconstruction, Speckle decorrelation