Efficient arbitrary volume reslicing for Pre-scan-converted volume in an ultrasound backend

Arbitrary volume reslicing (AVR) is used to generate 2D planes of any orientation from 3D data. Pre-scan-converted (pre-SC) AVR avoids the 3D scan conversion (SC) step and directly uses a pre-SC volume to generate 2D AVR planes. AVR is typically performed on a PC system external to the ultrasound frontend and backend. In this paper, we present an efficient pre-SC AVR algorithm in an ultrasound backend system. The backend supports AVR natively with other backend functions, so the PC system does not need to compute 2D AVR planes from 3D volumes. We used phantom and in vivo datasets to evaluate the pre-SC and post-SC AVR. The normalized root mean squared difference (NRMSD) was 1.23% for phantom data, and 1.21% for in vivo data. Using one of 8 cores in a multi-core processor, Cell, our algorithm can generate a 1024×768 16-bit AVR image in 30.2 ms from a 512×136×64 16-bit input volume.