Freehand 3D ultrasound imaging system using electromagnetic tracking

Ultrasound imaging is a non-invasive, real-time, low-cost, effective imaging modality for diagnosing and managing a variety of diseases. Most ultrasound-based clinical procedures are performed using conventional two-dimensional (2D) ultrasound images. However, accurate visualization and analysis of the three-dimensional (3D) anatomy using a sequence of 2D ultrasound images is often challenging. To overcome this challenge, several approaches have been proposed for 3D ultrasound imaging. This study contributes to these ongoing efforts by describing a freehand 3D ultrasound imaging system based on a conventional 2D ultrasound machine and a 3D electromagnetic tracking system. The synthesized 3D ultrasound volumes are visualized using the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) open-source library and the ParaView open-source application. The feasibility of our freehand 3D ultrasound imaging system is demonstrated by imaging a double cross-wire phantom.