Parallel integral projection transform for straight electrode localization in 3-D ultrasound images

Abstract

Abstract-In surgical practice, small metallic instruments are frequently used to perform various tasks inside the human body. We address the problem of their accurate localization in the tissue. Recent experiments using medical ultrasound have shown that this modality is suitable for real-time visualization of anatomical structures as well as the position of surgical instruments. We propose an imageprocessing algorithm that permits automatic estimation of the position of a line-segment-shaped object. This method was applied to the localization of a thin metallic electrode in biological tissue. We show that the electrode axis can be found through maximizing the Parallel Integral Projection transform that is a form of the Radon transform. To accelerate this step, hierarchical mesh-grid algorithm is implemented. Once the axis position is known, localization of the electrode tip is performed. The method was tested on simulated images, on ultrasound images of a tissue mimicking phantom containing a metallic electrode, and on real ultrasound images from breast biopsy. The results indicate that the algorithm is robust with respect to variations in electrode position and speckle noise. Localization accuracy is of the order of hundreds of micrometers and is comparable to the ultrasound system axial resolution.

Line filtering for surgical tool localization in 3D ultrasound images

“…Most tool localization techniques for 3D ultrasound are based on projections and Hough transform or Radon transform variants [9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. One general disadvantage of projection methods is their computational complexity, even though almost real-time speed can be achieved by using multiresolution [16,17] and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) implementation [18].…”

“…One general disadvantage of projection methods is their computational complexity, even though almost real-time speed can be achieved by using multiresolution [16,17] and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) implementation [18]. Mari et al [19] have proposed a fast approach which first limits the region of a 3D US volume, then uses a parallel integral projection (PIP) [14] to locate the position of a small straight tool. A more serious problem is that projection methods are easily confused if other highly echogenic objects are present in the image.…”

“…4. Tip localization -the endpoint of the tool is determined by robustly searching for a significant drop in voxel intensity along the axis [14].…”

“…The proposed line filtering method (Section 3.2) was compared to two variants (AxShp and IntDstr) of the previously described RANSAC localization method [20], to the parallel integral projection method (PIP) [14] and its multiresolution variant MR-PIP [17], and the randomized Hough transform (RHT) and its quick variant (Q-RHT) [12]. The reported times include line filtering and pre-processing.…”

Model Fitting Using RANSAC for Surgical Tool Localization in 3-D Ultrasound Images

“…The idea of modeling the tool using Bézier curves can be also applied to a RHT. Barva et al [15] proposed to use the parallel integral projection (PIP) to localize straight cylindrical objects in 3-D images. This approach is based on the observation that a projection of a tool is minimized when the projection is performed along the tool's axis.…”