Three-dimensional reconstruction of kidney from ultrasonic images

A new system for three-dimensional kidney reconstruction is proposed. In this system, the authors have designed a rotational sono-probe to acquire renal sonographic images at four equally separated angles with respect to a fixed rotational axis. Then, on each acquired renal sonogram, a boundary detection algorithm based on elliptic deformable model is used to extract the kidney boundary. This model can consider the renal shape globally and incorporates many significant information, therefore, the kidney boundary can be segmented from poor quality sonogram successfully. The four extracted kidney borders are then used for reconstructing the 3D kidney by stacking up kidney contours estimated with spline curves. No complicated alignment is necessary in the authors´ system. Experiments have shown good results in volume estimation for both in vivo and vitro studies