Preliminary Results in Large Bone Segmentation from 3D Freehand Ultrasound

摘要

Computer Assisted Orthopedic Surgery (CAOS) requires a correct registration between the patient in the operating room and the virtual models representing the patient in the computer. In order to increase the precision and accuracy of the registration a set of new techniques that eliminated the need to use fiducial markers have been developed. The majority of these newly developed registration systems are based on costly intraoperative imaging systems like Computed Tomography (CT scan) or Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). An alternative to these methods is the use of an Ultrasound (US) imaging system for the implementation of a more cost efficient intraoperative registration solution. In order to develop the registration solution with the US imaging system, the bone surface is segmented in both preoperative and intraoperative images, and the registration is done using the acquired surface. In this paper, we present the a preliminary results of a new approach to segment the bone surface from ultrasound volumes acquired by freehand 3D tracking of an ultrasound probe. The method is based on the enhancement of the voxels that belong to surface and its posterior segmentation. The enhancement process is based on the information provided by eigenanalysis of the multi-scale 3D Hessian matrix. The preliminary results show that from the enhanced volume the final bone surfaces can be extracted using a singular value thresholding.