An Interactive Editing Tool from Arbitrary Slices in 3D Ultrasound Volume Data

In 3D ultrasound, the interesting object is often blocked by nearby acoustic data. Therefore it is difficult to look at useful rendering results from arbitrary angles. We present a novel editing tool by firstly looking at the rendered 3D result, secondly identifying the structure to be removed, thirdly returning to the canonical volume data, and finally selecting one or more regions of interest (ROI) on an arbitrary slice. The proposed algorithms will transform ROI pixels on the slice plane (called the base pixels) to the original volume data and update them as unwanted voxels using trilinear interpolation. In our applications, the propagation of the slice could be bounded by a predefined rectangular box or determined from the user by moving a slider interactively. To speed up the updating of ROI voxels in the original volume space, we present a data structure to save them in an organized way: on each image frame, the ROI voxels are arranged as a set of line segments. Therefore, removing the ROI voxels will be done by scanning the line segments frame by frame. For algorithmic verification, we used a set of in vivo quadruplet images and successfully edited the volume data to achieve better visualization from certain view angles.