Cardiac ultrasound multiview fusion using a multicamera tracking system

Abstract

This study presents a novel approach to fuse multiple three-dimensional ultrasound scans using a multi-camera tracking system. Recent advances in echocardiography allow real-time three-dimensional dynamic acquisition of the heart. However, one of the major limitations of the three-dimensional echocardiography is the limited field-of-view (FOV), which may lead to an acquisition insufficient to cover the whole geometry of the heart. Recently, methods to improve the FOV and image quality have been introduced by acquiring multiple conventional single-view images with small transducer movements. These methods rely on image registration to align singleview images, and therefore, require sufficient overlap between images to obtain accurate alignment. In this study, we propose a method that relies on a multi-camera tracking system external to the images for image alignment, and therefore, it does not have the constraints of image overlap or quality. The multicamera tracking system is capable of tracking position and orientation information of several objects simultaneously. The accuracy of the alignment of the multi-camera tracking system is superior to the image resolution of echocardiography images. In this pilot project, we used a dynamic heart phantom and a cuboid gelatin phantom to evaluate our method and showed that the proposed method yielded an accurate alignment of image volumes in three-dimensional space.