%0 Journal Article
%T Fast and Automatic Ultrasound Simulation from CT Images
%A Weijian Cong
%A Jian Yang
%A Yue Liu
%A Yongtian Wang
%J Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/327613
%X Ultrasound is currently widely used in clinical diagnosis because of its fast and safe imaging principles. As the anatomical structures present in an ultrasound image are not as clear as CT or MRI. Physicians usually need advance clinical knowledge and experience to distinguish diseased tissues. Fast simulation of ultrasound provides a cost-effective way for the training and correlation of ultrasound and the anatomic structures. In this paper, a novel method is proposed for fast simulation of ultrasound from a CT image. A multiscale method is developed to enhance tubular structures so as to simulate the blood flow. The acoustic response of common tissues is generated by weighted integration of adjacent regions on the ultrasound propagation path in the CT image, from which parameters, including attenuation, reflection, scattering, and noise, are estimated simultaneously. The thin-plate spline interpolation method is employed to transform the simulation image between polar and rectangular coordinate systems. The Kaiser window function is utilized to produce integration and radial blurring effects of multiple transducer elements. Experimental results show that the developed method is very fast and effective, allowing realistic ultrasound to be fast generated. Given that the developed method is fully automatic, it can be utilized for ultrasound guided navigation in clinical practice and for training purpose. 1. Introduction The imaging principle behind an ultrasound is that the ultrasound wave generates a different amount of reflection or refraction when accounting for different tissues inside the human body. Given that the shape, density, and structure of different organs vary, the amounts of wavelets that are reflected or refracted can be used to reconstruct the anatomical structure of human tissues. Based on the wave pattern and image features, combined with personal anatomical and pathological knowledge, the texture and pathological characteristics of a specific organ can be quantified for medical professionals. Over the past decades, the ultrasound imaging technique has played increasingly important role in clinical diagnosis. As a fast and safe method of imaging, ultrasound is the most ideal imaging modality for real-time image-guided navigation in minimally intrusive surgery [1¨C3]. However, the ultrasound image is usually mixed with a high level of noise and the anatomical structure is not as clear as that in CT and MRI [4]. Hence, a successful ultrasound doctor has to possess a huge amount of anatomical knowledge, as well as considerable clinical
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/cmmm/2013/327613/