A MAP IIR filter for 3D ultrasound

Bayesian reconstruction methods are slow and have been avoided in 3D ultrasound, since fast algorithms are required. The paper tries to overcome this difficulty by presenting a fast reconstruction algorithm designed in a Bayesian framework, based on data dependent IIR filtering. Thus the benefits of Bayesian volume reconstruction and the computational efficiency of IIR recursive filtering may be obtained. The proposed filter has space varying coefficients which depend on the observed data in each region. The proposed method is evaluated using synthetic and real data. The results are compared with the MAP estimates obtained using a nonlinear optimization method. The proposed IIR recursive filtering algorithm achieves comparable results with the MAP algorithm and is twenty five times faster.