Automatic registration of 3-D ultrasound images

One of the most promising applications of 3-D ultrasound lies in the visualisation and volume estimation of internal 3-D structures. Unfortunately, artifacts and speckle make automatic analysis of the data difficult. In this paper we investigate the use of 3-D spatial compounding to improve data quality, and find that accurate registration is the key. A correlation-based registration technique is applied to 3-D ultrasound data acquired from in-vivo examinations of a human gall bladder. We find that the registration technique performs well, and visualisation and segmentation of the compounded data are clearly improved