Efficient scatter model for simulation of ultrasound images from computed tomography data

J. D'AMATO; L. LO VERCIO; P. RUBI; E. FERNANDEZ VERA; R. BARBUZA; M. DEL FRESNO; I. LARRABIDE

Cuenca

Simposio; SIPAIM; 2015

Background and motivation: Real-time ultrasound simulation refers to the process of computationally cre-ating fully synthetic ultrasound images instantly. Due to the high value of specialized low cost training forhealthcare professionals, there is a growing interest in the use of this technology and the development of highfidelity systems that simulate the acquisitions of ecographic images. The objective is to create an efficient andreproducible simulator that can run either on notebooks or desktops using low cost devices.Materials and methods: We present an interactive ultrasound simulator based on CT data. This simulator isbased on ray-casting and provides real-time interaction capabilities. The simulation of scattering that is coherentwith the transducer position in real time is also introduced. Such noise is produced using a simplified model ofmultiplicative noise and convolution with point spread functions (PSF) tailored for this purpose.Results: The computational efficiency of scattering maps generation was revised with an improved performance.This allowed a more efficient simulation of coherent scattering in the synthetic ecographic images while providinghighly realistic result. We describe some quality and performance metrics to validate these results, where aperformance of up to 55fps was achieved.Conclusion: The proposed technique for real-time scattering modeling provides realistic yet computationallyefficient scatter distributions. The error between the original image and the simulated scattering image wascompared for the proposed method and the state-of-the-art, showing negligible differences in its distribution.