Development of Ultrasound Diagnosis System for Carotid Artery Using Probe Pose Estimation and Three-dimensional Structure Reconstruction Techniques

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an ultrasound diagnosis system which reconstructs three-dimensional structure of carotid artery from volumetric ultrasound images captured by manual scanning using one-dimensional transducer. In this system, an optical marker is attached to the ultrasound transducer, and the three-dimensional pose of the transducer is estimated by using markers in images which are captured with a camera. A three-dimensional structure of the carotid artery is reconstructed by using the estimated pose of the transducer and the contours of the carotid artery extracted from the ultrasound images. Experimental results show that estimated errors for the three-dimensional poses of the transducer are less than 1 mm. We also confirm that estimated errors for the extracted outer contours and the center lines of the outer contours are less than 1 mm. Furthermore, we introduce an IMT (intima-media thickness) measurement navigation system which helps examiners perform the IMT measurement.