The application of 3D imaging in pediatric rheumatology helps to make the assessment of inflammatory changes more objective and to estimate accurately their volume and the actual response to treatment in the course of follow-up examinations. Additional interesting opportunities are opened up by the vascularity analysis with the help of power Doppler and color Doppler in 3D imaging. Contrast-enh...

The 2003 Rotterdam diagnostic criteria for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) support the objective role of ultrasound in defining the appearance of the PCO, but there are significant limitations of these new guidelines from an ultrasound perspective that must be considered. Three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound provides a new method for the objective quantitative assessment of follicle count, ovaria...

This thesis presents a real-time capable GPU-based ultrasound simulator suitable for medical education. Two different models are presented in the following. A 2D version has been implemented in order to simulate IVUS without modelling complex 3D geometry and a 3D version which is able to synthesize realistic looking ultrasound images in real-time. This includes ultrasound specific artifacts, wh...

Ultrasound technologies have been widely used in gynecology and obstetrics. Modern ultrasound systems allow the reconstruction of a 3D model of the subject being scanned, but even though visual interfaces have reached very high standards, the problem of representing a 3D image on a 2D computer screen still exists. Moreover no physical interaction is possible with such a model. The FeTouch syste...

Ultrasound technologies have been widely used in gynecology and obstetrics. Modern ultrasound systems allow the reconstruction of a 3D model of the subject being scanned. Even though visual interfaces have reached very high standards, the problem of representing a 3D image on a 2D computer screen still exists. Moreover no physical interaction is possible with such model. The Fetouch system, dev...

This paper presents a new robotic system designed to assist sonographers in performing ultrasound examinations by addressing common limitations of sonography, namely the physical fatigue that can result from performing the examination, and the difficulty in interpreting ultrasound data. The proposed system comprises a robot manipulator that operates the transducer, and an integrated user interf...

The reconstruction of 3D ultrasound (US) images from mechanically registered, but otherwise irregularly positioned, B-scan slices is of great interest in image guided therapy procedures. Conventional 3D ultrasound algorithms have low computational complexity, but the reconstructed volume suffers from severe speckle contamination. Furthermore, the current method cannot reconstruct uniform high-r...

Anatomical deformation caused by variable probe contact pressure is a significant problem in freehand 3D ultrasound, particularly for high resolution musculoskeletal and breast scans. We have previously published an amplitude-based algorithm for correcting such errors. In this paper, we compare this approach with a novel, elastography-inspired algorithm which works with the higher resolution ra...

The purpose of this study was to determine the feasibility of using an ultrasound contrast agent test bolus to determine optimum bolus timing for three-dimensional (3D) gadolinium (Gd)-enhanced magnetic resonance angiography (MRA). Small test doses of ultrasound contrast agent (0.3 ml Optison) were injected intravenously followed immediately by a 20 ml saline flush. Arrival of the contrast agen...

This paper is concerned with the use of the Level Set formalism to segment anatomical structures in 3D medical images (ultrasound or magnetic resonance images). A closed 3D surface propagates towards the desired boundaries through the iterative evolution of a 4D implicit function. The major contribution of this work is the design of a robust evolution model based on adaptive parameters dependin...