<title>Real-time 3D ultrasound imaging on a next-generation media processor</title>

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

3D ultrasound (US) provides physicians with a better understanding of human anatomy. By manipulating the 3D US data set, physicians can observe the anatomy in 3D from a number of different view directions and obtain 2D US images that would not be possible to directly acquire with the US probe. In order for 3D US to be in widespread clinical use, creation and manipulation of the 3D US data should be done at interactive times. This is a challenging task due to the large amount of data to be processed. Our group previously reported interactive 3D US imaging using a programmable mediaprocessor, Texas Instruments TMS320C80, which has been in clinical use. In this work, we present the algorithms we have developed for real-time 3D US using a newer and more powerful mediaprocessor, called MAP-CA. MAP-CA is a very long instruction word (VLIW) processor developed for multimedia applications. It has multiple execution units, a 32-kbyte data cache and a programmable DMA controller called the data streamer (DS). A forward mapping 6 DOF (for a freehand 3D US system based on magnetic position sensor for tracking the US probe) reconstruction algorithm with zero- order interpolation is achieved in 11.8 msec (84.7 frame/sec) per 512x512 8-bit US image. For 3D visualization of the reconstructed 3D US data sets, we used volume rendering and in particular the shear-warp factorization with the maximum intensity projection (MIP) rendering. 3D visualization is achieved in 53.6 msec (18.6 frames/sec) for a 128x128x128 8-bit volume and in 410.3 msec (2.4 frames/sec) for a 256x256x256 8-bit volume.