Preprocessing and efficient volume visualization of 3-D ultrasound image

Abstract

Visualization of 3-D data from ultrasound scanner is a challenging task due to the noisy and fuzzy nature of ultrasound imaging. This thesis presents an efficient volume visualization technique for 3-D ultrasound image, which has characteristics as follows: The proposed technique applies the truncated median filter as an alternative of mode filter in 2-D image to reduce speckle noise of the ultrasound image. The technique makes an improvement in rendering time without degradation of image quality. Especially, the proposed technique introduces a searching method of a plausible boundary of the object and improves the compositing method for ultrasound image. The proposed technique is compared to the conventional volume rendering methods with respect to the computation time and the subjective image quality. According to the comparison study, the proposed volume rendering method shows good performance for volume visualization of 3-D ultrasound image.