Inter-slice Correspondence for 2D Ultrasound-Guided Procedures

This paper reports on a new computational methodology, inter-slice correspondence (ISC), for robustly aligning sets of 2D ultrasound (US) slices during image-guided medical procedures. Correspondences are derived from distinctive, local scale-invariant features, which are used in one-to-many matching of US slices in near real-time despite out-of-plane rotation, in addition to global in-plane similarity transforms, occlusion, missing tissue, US plane mirroring, changes in US probe depth settings. Experiments demonstrate that ISC can align manually-acquired US slices without probe tracking information in the context of imageguided neurosurgery, with an accuracy of 1.3mm. A novel reconstructionwithout-calibration application based on ISC is proposed, where 3D US reconstruction results are very similar to those obtained via traditional phantom-based calibration.