A fast method for panoramic ultrasound imaging

Current Panoramic ultrasound suffers from the low computation speed due to a very large amount of ultrasound data to be processed. This paper describes a technique to register 2D multiframe ultrasound images and produce panoramic images in a rapid manner. For registration of any two adjacent images, we propose to select less image blocks which are regarded as the most valid blocks based on the importance of image content. In registration of a sequence of images, with an assumption that the moving direction and speed of the probe are nearly identical during the data collection, we estimate the moving speed of the probe at the beginning of data collection and ignore redundant image data by processing a smaller number of frames according to a frame interval. The experimental results show that our method can accurately produce EFOV images in real-time.