Tubular structure enhancement for surgical instrument detection in 3D ultrasound

Three-dimensional ultrasound has been an effective imaging modality for diagnostics and is now an emerging modality for image-guided minimally-invasive interventions since it enables visualization of both instruments and tissue. Challenges to ultrasound-guided interventions arise, however, due to the low signal-to-noise ratio and the imaging artifacts created by the interventional instruments. Metallic instruments, in particular, are strong scatters and so produce a variety of artifacts. For many interventions, the manual or robotic instrument is comprised of a long curved tubular structure with specialized tooling at its tip. Toward the goal of developing a surgical navigation system, this paper proposes an image processing algorithm for enhancing the tubular structure of imaged instruments while also reducing imaging artifacts. Experiments are presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach in the context of robotic instruments whose shape comprises a smooth curve along their length.