Efficient volume visualization of 3-D ultrasound image

Visualization of 3-D data from ultrasound images is a challenging task due to the noisy and fuzzy nature of ultrasound image and large amounts of computation time. This paper presents an efficient volume rendering technique for visualization of 3-D ultrasound image using the noise-reduction filtering and extraction of the boundary surface with good image quality. The truncated-median filter in 2-D ultrasound image is proposed for reducing speckle noise within acceptable processing time. In order to adapt the fuzzy nature of boundary surface of ultrasound image, an adaptive thresholding is also proposed. The decision of threshold is based on the idea that effective boundary surface is estimated by the gray level above an adequate noise threshold and width along the pixel ray. The proposed rendering method is simulated with 3-D fetus ultrasound image of 148x194x112 voxels. Several preprocessing methods were tested and compared with respect to the computation time and the subjective image quality. According to the comparison study, the proposed volume rendering method shows good performance for volume visualization of 3-D ultrasound image.