Good and Bad Boundaries in Ultrasound Compounding: Preserving Anatomic Boundaries While Suppressing Artifacts

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel ultrasound compounding algorithm using Laplacian and Gaussian Pyramids to better preserve anatomical boundaries and suppress artifacts, improving volumetric reconstruction quality.

Contribution

The paper presents a new ultrasound compounding method that effectively preserves boundary details and reduces artifacts by leveraging multi-scale pyramid techniques.

Findings

Preserves both bright and dark features effectively.

Reduces artifacts compared to previous methods.

Enhances volumetric ultrasound image quality.

Abstract

Ultrasound 3D compounding is important for volumetric reconstruction, but as of yet there is no consensus on best practices for compounding. Ultrasound images depend on probe direction and the path sound waves pass through, so when multiple intersecting B-scans of the same spot from different perspectives yield different pixel values, there is not a single, ideal representation for compounding (i.e. combining) the overlapping pixel values. Current popular methods inevitably suppress or altogether leave out bright or dark regions that are useful, and potentially introduce new artifacts. In this work, we establish a new algorithm to compound the overlapping pixels from different view points in ultrasound. We uniquely leverage Laplacian and Gaussian Pyramids to preserve the maximum boundary contrast without overemphasizing noise and speckle. We evaluate our algorithm by comparing ours with previous algorithms, and we show that our approach not only preserves both light and dark details, but also somewhat suppresses artifacts, rather than amplifying them.