Artifacts can be defined as any structure in an ultrasound image that does not have a corresponding anatomic tissue structure. Artifacts are a common occurrence in an ultrasound display since they are often the result of the physical properties of ultrasound itself. Recognizing artifacts is essential to proper ultrasound interpretation, as not identifying an artifact as such may lead to unwarra...

We propose a methodology to perform real time image-based tracking on streaming 4D ultrasound data, using image registration to deduce the positioning of each ultrasound frame in a global coordinate system. Our method provides an alternative approach to traditional external tracking devices used for tracking probe movements. We compare the performance of our method against magnetic tracking on ...

The multiple active contours (snakes) are widely used in image processing to extract objects of interest. However, initialization of the active contours is still an open problem. This paper proposes a new completely automatic initialization of snakes based on a combination of Phrase Portrait Analysis (PPA) image intensity clustering and multi-stage evolution of the active contours. The proposed...

An experimental system and interface that indicate the likelihood of deep venous thrombosis using objective measures was developed, based on ultrasound image processing using a modified Star-Kalman algorithm and a sensorized ultrasound probe. Force, location and image data is used to assess a vessel segment for compression. A user interface displays the results using a 3-D representation. A tis...

Introduction: one of the minimally invasive methods of treatmenting liver malignancies is Radiofrequency Ablation (RFA) which can be applied to primary or secondary tumors. Nevertheless, the disease recurrence is probable after RFA application partially due to the inadequate capability of temperature monitoring of the target tissue and visualizing the thermal damage. The goal of this work was t...

A new contour-tracking algorithm is presented for ultrasound tongue image sequences, which can follow the motion of tongue contours over long durations with good robustness. To cope with missing segments caused by noise, or by the tongue midsagittal surface being parallel to the direction of ultrasound wave propagation, active contours with a contour-similarity constraint are introduced, which ...

The goal of this project is to develop visual servoing for intraoperative robotic ultrasound. The doctor would select a predefined volume from a reference image such as CT or MRI which was obtained before the procedure. Subsequently the robot would image the patient with an ultrasound probe at the predefined volume of interest. This technique would allow the doctor to obtain accurate anatomy of...

This paper introduces an efficient algorithm for segmentation of fetal ultrasound images using the multiresolution analysis technique. The proposed algorithm decomposes the input image into a multiresolution space using the B-spline two-dimensional wavelet transform. The system builds features vector for each pixel that contains information about the gray level, moments and other texture inform...

In this paper we introduce an application of intervalvalued systems to the segmentation of prostate ultrasound images. The system classifies each pixel as prostate or background. The input variables are the values of each pixel in different processed images as proximity, edginess and enhanced image. The system has 20 rules and is trained with ideal images segmented by an expert. Interval-valued...