Efficient volume ray-casting for ultrasound visualization

초록

Ultrasound imaging is performed with a transducer which transmits ultrasound pulses into the body and receives the echoes. Ultrasound data is difficult to visualize because the quality of the data are degraded by artifact and speckle noise, and gathered by non-linear sampling. In this paper, we use several optimization methods for efficient ultrasound visualization. First method, denoted as adaptive ray sampling, is to reduce the number of sampling by adjusting sampling interval in empty space. Second, we use bi-linear interpolation instead of tri-linear interpolation for sampling in transparent region. Third, we remove speckle noise that is confined to transparent region in gathering ultrasound data. We conclude that our method reduces the rendering time without loss of image quality in comparison to the conventional method.