A dual transducer approach to ultrasound imaging and spatial deformations

Ultrasound images exhibit inherent geometric distortions due to variations in sound speed within the body. Other distortions include missing surfaces parallel to the direction of the ultrasonic rays, intense speckle noise, shadows and resolution inconsistency. These depend on the positioning of the transducer relative to the scanned organs, and considerably degrade the quality of the images obtained. We introduce a new algorithm that combines ultrasound images taken from different angles using spatial warping and compounding to obtain a quality-enhanced image. The algorithm is iterative: in each iteration the B-Mode images are divided into blocks and a matching procedure is performed between blocks of the reference images. The pixels are translated according to inter-block interpolation, subject to physical and medical constraints, resulting in warped images that function as the input signal to the following iteration. The algorithm was implemented and tested in-vitro and the results are presented and discussed