Automatic Three-Dimensional Ultrasound Scanning System Based on RGB-D Camera

Ultrasound (US) imaging, as a non-invasive, low cost, real-Time imaging modality, is widely used in the routine diagnosis and medical evaluation. To increase the performance of current US system, more and more attention has been attracted in the field of integrating the auxiliary devices into the US system. In this paper, we proposed a scanning system based on RGB-D camera for three-dimensional imaging. A depth camera was adopted to capture the point cloud of the scanned tissue. The operator could determine the scan path in the way of drawing a straight line. According to the point cloud, a 3D translating device would drive the probe to scan the tissue. Meanwhile, the B-scans and their corresponding positional information would be recorded for volume reconstruction. In vitro and in vivo experiments were performed to validate the performance of the proposed system. Quantitative results show that the error of volume measurement was less than 1%. It is expected that the proposed system will be clinically useful.