Abstract for gee_tr510

Cambridge University Engineering Department Technical Report CUED/F-INFENG/TR510

SENSORLESS FREEHAND 3D ULTRASOUND IN REAL TISSUE: SPECKLE DECORRELATION WITHOUT FULLY DEVELOPED SPECKLE

A.H. Gee, R.J. Housden, P. Hassenpflug, G.M. Treece and R.W. Prager

January 2005

It has previously been demonstrated that freehand 3D ultrasound can be acquired without a position sensor by measuring the elevational speckle decorrelation from frame to frame. However, this requires that the B-scans contain significant amounts of fully developed speckle. In this paper, we show that this condition is rarely satisfied in scans of real tissue, which instead exhibit fairly ubiquitous coherent scattering. By examining the axial and lateral correlation functions, we propose an heuristic technique to quantify the amount of coherency at each point in the B-scans. This leads to an adapted elevational decorrelation scheme which allows for the coherent scattering. Using the adapted scheme, we demonstrate markedly improved reconstructions of animal tissue in vitro.

[790 KBytes PDF, 19 pages]


(ftp:) gee_tr510.pdf (http:) gee_tr510.pdf

If you have difficulty viewing files that end '.gz', which are gzip compressed, then you may be able to find tools to uncompress them at the gzip web site.

If you have difficulty viewing files that are in PostScript, (ending '.ps' or '.ps.gz'), then you may be able to find tools to view them at the gsview web site.

We have attempted to provide automatically generated PDF copies of documents for which only PostScript versions have previously been available. These are clearly marked in the database - due to the nature of the automatic conversion process, they are likely to be badly aliased when viewed at default resolution on screen by acroread.