This application claims the benefit of Chinese Patent Application No. 201010624654.3 filed Dec. 27, 2010, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
The present invention relates to an ultrasound imaging technique, and in particular, to a method and an apparatus for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging in image guidance applications.
Medical device ultrasound guidance is used in many medical applications for the purpose of guiding various types of invasive medical devices, such as aspiration and biopsy needles, etc., towards specific targets within a patient's body. The guidance can simplify such procedures and make them safer and quicker to perform. To visualize a needle most efficiently, a wide-angle scan frame orthogonal to needle direction is used to get the most echoes back from the needle. General methods such as B steer will introduce artifacts when compounding the wide-angle frame directly.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and an apparatus that can suppress artifacts and tissue signals while enhancing needle signals in the wide-angle frame before compounding the frame.
A method and an apparatus that can suppress artifacts and tissue signals while enhancing needle signals are provided.
In one aspect, a method for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging is provided. The method includes an adjusting step for reducing overall gain in needle frames, and a mapping step for applying a nonlinear mapping to the needle frames, wherein the nonlinear mapping is arranged to make strong signals stronger and make weak signals weaker after mapping.
According to one embodiment, the method for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging may further include an enhancement step for applying edge enhancement filtering to the needle frames.
According to another embodiment, in the enhancement step, a filter template with non-zero coefficients along average needle directions is defined, and then cross-correlation is made between the needle frames and the filter template.
According to another embodiment, the method for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging may further include a thresholding step in which for each pixel point in each needle frame, if its correlation value is smaller than a predetermined threshold value, then the pixel point is set to zero.
According to another embodiment, the method for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging may further include a controlling step for applying time gain control to a uniform needle brightness along depth.
According to another embodiment, the method for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging may further include a configuration step for differently configuring transmitting frequency, receiving equalization filter, line density, and/or focal zone positions of the needle frames to obtain a needle image with minimal artifacts.
According to another embodiment, the method for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging may further include a filling step for using beams from the same origin but with different steering angles to fill a distribution loss area of the needle frame linear beams. In one embodiment, different gains are applied to the beams with different steering angles to compensate for different reflection effects of each beam from the needle.
In another aspect, a method for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging is provided. The method includes a filtering step for filtering a wide-angle image of a needle with an anisotropic filter to remove noise and preserve edge information, a detecting step for detecting image edge, a transforming step for applying Hough transform to the detected image, a determining step for determining parallel lines by using a result from the Hough transform and a generating step for generating a pattern matrix, and filling a area between the parallel lines with 1 and the rest with 0.
In yet another aspect, an apparatus for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging is provided. The apparatus includes an adjusting module for reducing overall gain in needle frames, and a mapping module for applying a nonlinear mapping to the needle frames, wherein the mapping module is configured to make strong signals stronger and make weak signals weaker after nonlinear mapping.
According to one embodiment, the apparatus for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging may further include an enhancement module for applying edge enhancement filtering to the needle frames.
According to another embodiment, the enhancement module is used to define a filter template with non-zero coefficients along average needle directions, and then to make cross-correlation between the needle frames and the filter template.
According to another embodiment, the apparatus for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging may further include a thresholding module that for each pixel point in each needle frame, sets the pixel point to zero if its correlation value is smaller than a predetermined threshold value.
According to another embodiment, the apparatus for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging may further include a controlling module for applying time gain control to a uniform needle brightness along depth.
According to another embodiment, the apparatus for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging may further include a configuration module for differently configuring transmitting frequency, receiving equalization filter, line density, and/or focal zone positions of the needle frames to enhance needle image with minimal artifacts.
According to another embodiment, the apparatus for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging may further include a filling module that uses beams from the same origin but with different steering angles to fill a distribution loss area of the needle frame linear beams.
In yet another aspect, an ultrasound imaging guidance system that includes an apparatus for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging is provided.
The method and apparatus described herein can effectively highlight needles with little degradation of image quality, but don't require extra hardware or hardware modification, and eventually help to improve workflow of needle guidance procedures.
Exemplary embodiments are described herein with reference to the drawings, in which the same or substantially the same parts are denoted with the same reference signs.
As a highly reflective object, a needle is highlighted in an ultrasound image when a scanning angle is vertical to or approximately vertical to the needle angle. However, it is very difficult to distinguish the needle from normal tissues in post-processing, because the image data is typically compressed to 8-bit. If this needle frame is compounded with the frames of normal tissues directly, it introduces artifacts produced by grating lobes and degraded tissue images together with strong needle signals. Therefore, it is critical to suppress artifacts and tissue signals while enhancing needle signals in wide-angle frames before compounding. As shown in
One or more frames of tissue data and one or more frames of needle data are collected. Tissue frames can be configured for best tissue image quality. The tissue frame(s) may consist of only a straight frame like typical b-mode imaging, or multiple frames like what is typically implemented in spatial compounding, for example frames with steering angles of −15 degrees, 0 degree, and 15 degrees.
A needle frame is a frame with a large steering angle so that the beam direction is vertical or approximately vertical with respect to the needle direction. For example, the steering angle may be 45 degrees. At the same time, needle frame also may be a compounded frame of multi-angle frames. Angles at which a doctor inserts a needle are different in different applications. When the beam incidence direction for the needle frame is vertical to the needle direction, the best effect can be achieved. Thus, by means of multi-angle scanning, the needle frame can be obtained by compounding. For example, two frames resulting from 25 degree and 45 degree scanning can be directly compounded into a needle frame. The needle frame can be configured differently to maximally enhance needle image with minimal artifacts in configuration step 202. The different configurations may include transmitting frequency, receiving equalization filter, line density, focal zone positions, etc. For better image quality and less resources, the needle frame imaging may be configured differently from the tissue frames. For example, the imaging frequency is lowered to improve transmit element directivity, thereby improving image quality while suppressing grating lobes. This may be implemented by transmitting a low frequency waveform or reducing the center frequency of a receiving band-pass filter. Alternatively, harmonic imaging may be used to reduce grating lobes. Other configurations may be changed as well. For example, the number of transmitting focal zones may be reduced for better frame rate. Furthermore, since frequency is lowered, the number of beams used to construct a b-mode frame may be reduced to further improve the frame rate.
Furthermore, the needle frame can be further processed to enhance the needle and suppress the tissue and artifacts. The method according to one embodiment can process the needle frame based on amplitude information, spatial information or the combination of both. Amplitude processing may include gain adjustment, amplifying, thresholding, and nonlinear mapping, etc. Spatial processing may include anisotropic smoothing, edge enhancement by cross-correlating to a template, etc. The processed needle frames are then compounded with tissue frames to form the final enhanced image. The compounding may be implemented by using arithmetic averaging, maximal detection, etc.
In one embodiment, tissue frames are composed of frames of three regular steering angles, i.e., −15 degrees, 0 degree, and 15 degrees. A needle frame has a steering angle of 45 degrees, or a plurality of wide-angle scanning frames are compounded to obtain the needle frame.
Edge enhancement step 204 applies edge enhancement filtering to the needle frame. The edge enhancement method according to one embodiment is as follows. A template with non-zero coefficients along average needle directions is defined. Cross-correlation is made between the needle frame and the template. As a result, the needle is enhanced while other tissue signals and artifacts are suppressed.
In addition, thresholding step 206 may apply thresholding to the resultant data to further suppress non-needle signals. As shown in
The overall gain in needle frames may also be adjusted in adjusting step 208. In other words, overall gain is reduced in needle data. Since needle signal is very strong in the needle frame, reducing gain further suppresses tissue/artifacts while maintaining good signal strength of the needle. Optionally, time gain control TGC may be applied for a uniform needle brightness along depth in controlling step 210.
Next, a nonlinear mapping may be applied so as to enhance the needle while suppressing tissue/artifacts in mapping step 212. The nonlinear mapping is designed so that strong signals (typically from the needle) are stronger while weak signals (typically from tissue or artifacts) are weaker. As shown in
In addition, beam patterns of the needle frame and the tissue frame may also be different. The traditional tissue frame and needle frame both use linear beam distribution, as shown in
As shown in
In the needle frame, as the steering angles of scanning beams become smaller, the amplitude of the needle signals decreases accordingly. Thus, beams with different steering angles use different gains to compensate for different reflection effects of each beam from the needle. Therefore, a more consistent needle image can be obtained, as shown in
According to another embodiment, an alternative method to maintain needle signal while suppressing tissue/artifacts in the needle frame is to use pattern recognition methods to identify needle region. Then, a mask may be generated so that data outside the needle region is 0. An example implementation is as follows.
As shown in
Specifically, the program codes in the computer program 1211 for the apparatus 1100 include a filling module 1211a for performing the step 200, a configuration module 1211b for performing the step 202, an enhancement module 1211c for performing the step 204, a thresholding module 1211d for performing the step 206, an adjusting module 1211e for performing the step 208, a controlling module 1211f for performing the step 210, and a mapping module 1211g for performing the step 212. In other words, when the different modules 1211a-1211g are executed on the processing unit 1213, they correspond to the modules 1102, 1104, 1106, 1108, 1110, 1112 and 1114 shown in
The apparatus 1100 for enhancing needle visualization in ultrasound imaging according to the above embodiments may be implemented in various ultrasound imaging guidance systems by means of software, hardware, firmware or any combination thereof. The implementation is easy for persons skilled in the art, and accordingly, is not described in detail herein.
While the present invention has been described with reference to specific exemplary embodiments, it is not confined to these specific embodiments. Persons skilled in the art should understand that various modifications, replacements, changes and the like may be made to the invention. For example, one step or module in the above embodiments can be divided into two or more steps or modules. Further, two or more steps or modules in the above embodiments can be incorporated into one step or module. However, all of these fall within the scope of the present invention, without departing from the spirit of the invention. In addition, terms used herein are not limitations, but only serve the purpose of illustration. Furthermore, “one embodiment”, “another embodiment” and the like as used herein may refer to different embodiments. Certainly, all of these embodiments or at least some of them may be combined in one embodiment.
Number | Date | Country | Kind |
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201010624654.3 | Dec 2010 | CN | national |
Number | Date | Country | |
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20120209107 A1 | Aug 2012 | US |