Global Patch Matching (GPM) for freehand 3D ultrasound reconstruction

Background: 3D ultrasound volume reconstruction from B-model ultrasound slices can provide more clearly and intuitive structure of tissue and lesion for the clinician. Methods: This paper proposes a novel Global Path Matching method for the 3D reconstruction of freehand ultrasound images. The proposed method composes of two main steps: bin-filling scheme and hole-filling strategy. For the bin-filling scheme, this study introduces two operators, including the median absolute deviation and the inter-quartile range absolute deviation, to calculate the invariant features of each voxel in the 3D ultrasound volume. And the best contribution range for each voxel is obtained by calculating the Euclidian distance between current voxel and the voxel with the minimum invariant features. Hence, the intensity of the filling vacant voxel can be obtained by weighted combination of the intensity distribution of pixels in the best contribution range. For the hole-filling strategy, three conditions, including the confidence term, the data term and the gradient term, are designed to calculate the weighting coefficient of the matching patch of the vacant voxel. While the matching patch is obtained by finding patches with the best similarity measure that defined by the three conditions in the whole 3D volume data. Results: Compared with VNN, PNN, DW, FMM, BI and KR methods, the proposed Global Path Matching method can restore the 3D ultrasound volume with minimum difference. Conclusions: Experimental results on phantom and clinical data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method for the reconstruction of ultrasound volume.