Virtual movements-based calibration method of ultrasound probe for computer assisted surgery

Three-dimensional freehand ultrasound has found several clinical applications, such as in Computer Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery CAOS. Since the last decade, the US applications in CAOS allow the surgeon to objectively plan out critical surgical variables, and would result in improved surgical outcomes. A key step of all the freehand ultrasound imaging systems is calibration. This paper is devoted to present a novel concept for freehand ultrasound calibration method which is based on probe movement simulation in virtual environment. This method has significant advantages over all the prior approaches. Our experiments show that the novel method can be captured fairly accurately by a large number of data points generated by only one ultrasound image using the simulation concept. The added advantages are that it is so fast, easy to use, and does not need user intervention, so it is totally automatic.