Real-time extended-field-of-view ultrasound based on a standard PC

Extended field-of-view (EFOV) can acquire a full field of vision, which can help doctors to make more objective and accurate diagnosis. Current EFOV techniques suffer from the low computation speed due to the large amount of ultrasound data to be processed. This paper describes an efficient technique to register 2D multiframe ultrasound images and produce EFOV images with significantly reduced computation time based on a standard PC. For registration of any two adjacent images, we propose to select less image blocks which are regarded as the most valid blocks based on the importance of image content. In registration of a sequence of images, with an assumption that the moving direction and speed of the probe are nearly identical during the data collection, we estimate the moving speed of the probe at the beginning of data collection and ignore redundant image data by processing a smaller number of frames according to a frame interval. The experimental results show that the computation speed of our method is increased by 7–80 times in comparison with two traditional methods, and can accurately produce EFOV images in real-time.