New ultrasound image display with extended field of view
Arun P. Tirumalai, Lee Weng, Alexander Grassmann, Ming Li, Steve Marquis, Pat Sutcliffe, David E. Gustafson, Jin Kim, Chris Basoglu, Thomas C. Winter, Yongmin Kim · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1997
The narrow fields of view obtained from real-time ultrasound transducers, especially with linear array transducers, allow focused evaluation of a specific site but often without any anatomic reference. To allow medical ultrasound imaging to be used in more diverse clinical settings, we have created a new acquisition and display process that allows extended field of view (XFOV) imaging. To produce an XFOV image, extended acoustic slices are obtained by maneuvering the transducer along the body surface or inside. As the images are acquired, they are correlated, aligned, and spliced together into a long composite view, all without the use of a position sensor. This computationally intensive process involves image registration, geometric image transformation, panoramic image construction, and image display. The XFOV process executes in real-time on our programmable ultrasound processing subsystem, the programmable ultrasound image processor, which fits within an existing ultrasound system and supports native ultrasound signal and image processing.