Volumetric reconstruction and visualization in three dimensional echocardiography: in vitro investigation

An object spinning scan method was applied to acquire high resolution in vitro ultrasound images for the purpose of studying volume interpolation and rendering. Three dimensional (3D) reconstructions were accomplished for nineteen excised porcine and canine hearts. The resulting 3D images clearly revealed the 3D features with a user developed weighted opacity based interactive volume rendering approach. The 3D calculated left ventricular volumes correlated well to those measured from water displacement (r=0.9548). This study not only provides superior reference data sets investigation of volumetric reconstruction visualization methodologies, the employed methods of reconstruction and visualization can also be adapted to in vivo transesophageal 3D imaging