Multi-DoF probe trajectory reconstruction with local sensors for 2D-to-3D ultrasound

Abstract

Handheld 2D ultrasound is very useful for intra-operative imaging, but requires some reconstruction effort in order to create 3D US volumes, unless one is using large and expensive 3D US probes. Unlike common probe tracking approaches involving either global or local tracking algorithms (suffering from jitter and complexity or from drift), we propose to use a combination of local sensors to reconstruct the probe trajectory with multiple degrees of freedom. The presented sensors are very low-cost- optical mice and a Wii Remote - yet enable flexible 3D US acquisition with no global tracking overhead. The resulting trajectories are then used as input for a dynamically expanding, pixel-nearest-neighbor 3D US volume reconstruction.