Towards Interactive and Realistic Rendering of 3D Fetal Ultrasound via Photon Mapping

Three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound is extensively used in obstetrics and gynecology, and realistic rendering results can both enhance the accuracy of diagnosis and facilitate communication between obstetricians and pregnant women. This paper proposes an interactive and realistic rendering method using global illumination effects for 3D ultrasound images with low signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) values. The method is capable of generating both single and multiple scattering effects, and separately rendering these two illuminations using ray-casting. Volumetric photon mapping is used to simulate indirect illumination. In order to avoid complex storage structures and accelerate the computational speed, a new screen-space destiny estimation is proposed to calculate the radiance of each photon. In addition, to solve the issue of the foetal skin exceeding the dynamic range capability of the display device, high-dynamic range (HDR) methods are further incorporated in our method. Experiments demonstrate that our method can produce realistic rendering results with enhanced depth information compared to traditional approaches.