Search for the Best Matching Ultrasound Frame based on Spatial and Temporal Saliencies

摘要

In this paper we present a generic system for fast and accurate retrieval of the best matching frame from Ultrasound video clips given a reference Ultrasound image. It is challenging to build a generic system to handle various lesion types without any prior information of the anatomic structures of the Ultrasound data. We propose to solve the problem based on both spatial and temporal saliency maps calculated from the Ultrasound images, which implicitly analyze the semantics of images and emphasize the anatomic regions of interest. The spatial saliency map describes the importance of the pixels of the reference image while the temporal saliency map further distinguishes the subtle changes of the anatomic structure in a video. A hierarchical comparison scheme based on a novel similarity measure is employed to locate the most similar frames quickly and precisely. Our system ensures the robustness, accuracy and efficiency. Experiments show that our system achieves more accurate results with fast speed.