Needle segmentation in 3D ultrasound images based on phase grouping
Siying Zhao, Wu Qiu, Ming Yuchi, Mingyue Ding · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2009
Three Dimensional (3D) ultrasound images can provide spatial information to help doctors locate the needle position precisely in ultrasound-guided surgery. In this paper, we present a method called "3D Phase-grouping" to segment the needle inside the patient. The method is an extension from 2D phase-grouping to the 3D case via a new mathematic model-the outer products of adjacent orientation vectors. Firstly, the voxels with the same outer products of the gradient orientation vectors of the adjacent points are divided into Line Support Regions (LSR). Then, the needle is extracted with the 3D Least-Squares line fitting method in the maximal LSR. Synthetic and 3D ultrasound phantom data were tested. The segmentation results were evaluated by the angular deviation, position deviation and computational time. Compared with the 3D Hough transform, 3D Phase-Grouping is more accurate and faster without using pre-information. The computational complexity and robustness of the algorithm remain to be our future research topics.