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Spatiotemporal reconstruction method of carotid artery ultrasound from freehand sonography

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

4D reconstruction based on radiation-free ultrasound can provide valuable information about the anatomy. Current 4D US technologies are either faced with limited field-of-view (FoV), technical complications, or cumbersome setups. This paper proposes a spatiotemporal US reconstruction framework to enhance its ability to provide dynamic structure information.

Methods

We propose a spatiotemporal US reconstruction framework based on freehand sonography. First, a collecting strategy is presented to acquire 2D US images in multiple spatial and temporal positions. A morphology-based phase extraction method after pose correction is presented to decouple the compounding image variations. For temporal alignment and reconstruction, a robust kernel regression model is established to reconstruct images in arbitrary phases. Finally, the spatiotemporal reconstruction is demonstrated in the form of 4D movies by integrating the US images according to the tracked poses and estimated phases.

Results

Quantitative and qualitative experiments were conducted on the carotid US to validate the feasibility of the proposed pipeline. The mean phase localization and heart rate estimation errors were 0.07 ± 0.04 s and 0.83 ± 3.35 bpm, respectively, compared with cardiac gating signals. The assessment of reconstruction quality showed a low RMSE (<0.06) between consecutive images. Quantitative comparisons of anatomy reconstruction from the generated US volumes and MRI showed an average surface distance of 0.39 ± 0.09 mm on the common carotid artery and 0.53 ± 0.05 mm with a landmark localization error of 0.60 ± 0.18 mm on carotid bifurcation.

Conclusion

A novel spatiotemporal US reconstruction framework based on freehand sonography is proposed that preserves the utility nature of conventional freehand US. Evaluations on in vivo datasets indicated that our framework could achieve acceptable reconstruction performance and show potential application value in the US examination of dynamic anatomy.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge supports from National Natural Science Foundation of China (82027807, 81901844), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021M701928), and Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation (7212202, L192013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Hanying Liang, Guochen Ning, Shangqi Dai, Longfei Ma, Jianwen Luo, Xinran Zhang & Hongen Liao

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Correspondence to Hongen Liao.

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This article does contain a study with human participants and was approved by the Tsinghua University Institutional Review Board under the number 20210074. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Liang, H., Ning, G., Dai, S. et al. Spatiotemporal reconstruction method of carotid artery ultrasound from freehand sonography. Int J CARS 17, 1731–1743 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-022-02672-6

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