Three-dimensional ultrasound

Enabling volume measurements with a two-dimensional ultrasound probe

Master thesis (2021)

Authors

S.J. Fransen Mechanical Engineering

Contributors

N. Bhattacharya ImPhys/Medical Imaging - AS (supervisor 1)
Thomas van den Heuvel Radboud University Medical Center (supervisor 1)
K.W.A. van Dongen ImPhys/Medical Imaging - AS (supervisor 2)
Sophinese Iskander-Rizk Optical Technologies - Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering (supervisor 2)
Faculty
Mechanical Engineering
Copyright: © 2021 Stefan Fransen
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Published Date

12-03-2021

Language

English

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Faculty

Mechanical Engineering

Abstract

This work investigates low-cost three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound reconstruction from a two-dimensional (2D) hand-held probe with motion tracking. The best available motion tracking is an optical tracking system, which is expensive and requires external tracking hardware. Here, a low-cost manoeuvrable motion tracker, an inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor, has been tested by comparing it with an optical tracking system. The motion of the probe has been divided into a rotation and translation movement. Comparing the IMU sensor rotation tracking with the optical tracking, while rotating 40 degrees, resulted in an average Pearson’s correlation of 0.99 ± 0.0056. The average Pearson’s correlation between the translation tracking of the IMU sensor and the optical tracking system, in a translation of 15 centimetres, was 0.13 ± 0.78. The rotation and translation tracking is used to reconstruct the ultrasound volume of a phantom. In a rocking motion reconstructed volume the horizontal distance between phantom features had a mean error of 45%, a vertical distance was reconstructed with a mean error of 0.25%. In a translation motion reconstructed volume these errors were 29% and 1.4% for respectively horizontal feature distance and vertical feature distance. This study demonstrates that an IMU sensor can be used to track the motion of the probe. The rotation tracking of the IMU sensor is comparable with the rotation tracking of an optical tracking system. The translation tracking of the IMU sensor is on average not comparable with an optical tracking system, however some translations have been tracked with a high correlation. A reason to explain the low average correlation of the translation tracking of the IMU sensor is the method of gravity vector correction in the accelerometer data. Future research should focus on the clinical evaluation of the rotation tracking and the development of an accurate translation tracking method by studying the initial gravity vector or looking at different translation tracking methods.