Quantitative Assessment of Variational Surface Reconstruction from Sparse Point Clouds in Freehand 3D Ultrasound Imaging during Image-Guided Tumor Ablation

Shuangcheng Deng,Yunhua Li,Ping Liang,Lipei Jiang

doi:10.3390/app6040114

Abstract

Surface reconstruction for freehand 3D ultrasound is used to provide 3D visualization of a VOI (volume of interest) during image-guided tumor ablation surgery. This is a challenge because the recorded 2D B-scans are not only sparse but also non-parallel. To solve this issue, we established a framework to reconstruct the surface of freehand 3D ultrasound imaging in 2011. The key technique for surface reconstruction in that framework is based on variational interpolation presented by Greg Turk for shape transformation and is named Variational Surface Reconstruction (VSR). The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the quality of surface reconstructions, especially when the input data are extremely sparse point clouds from freehand 3D ultrasound imaging, using four methods: Ball Pivoting, Power Crust, Poisson, and VSR. Four experiments are conducted, and quantitative metrics, such as the Hausdorff distance, are introduced for quantitative assessment. The experiment results show that the performance of the proposed VSR method is the best of the four methods at reconstructing surface from sparse data. The VSR method can produce a close approximation to the original surface from as few as two contours, whereas the other three methods fail to do so. The experiment results also illustrate that the reproducibility of the VSR method is the best of the four methods.

Highlights

In recent years, image-guided percutaneous tumor ablation has become more and more widespread in clinical applications because of its minimally invasive characteristics [1,2,3]
Three imaging modalities are commonly used for guidance of intra-operative tumor ablation: computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and ultrasound imaging (US)
2, we model reconstructed a human kidney from non-parallel contours re-sampled from fromIn anExperiment original surface of the kidney

Summary

Introduction

Image-guided percutaneous tumor ablation has become more and more widespread in clinical applications because of its minimally invasive characteristics [1,2,3]. Three imaging modalities are commonly used for guidance of intra-operative tumor ablation: computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and ultrasound imaging (US). CT and MRI provide large or adequate fields of view, and good contrast and resolution, but they are limited by costs, the need to adapt equipment for a magnetic field, availability, and radiation doses in clinical applications. US can provide the unique advantages of low cost, real-time monitoring, and a lack of ionizing radiation, but lacks a large field of view and adequate resolution at increasing lesion.

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