Abstract

Medical image information representation using two dimensional image planes have major drawbacks on the grounds that the there are technical constrains in providing the optimized spatial orientation and physical limitations. In comparison, three dimensional imaging shows higher degree of versatility in clinical application. Conventional anisotropic diffusion and speckle removal might have promising performance on 2D ultrasonic images, but it is not effective in 3D ultrasonic images. In this paper, we have developed extension algorithms for 3D diffusion in ultrasonic volume rendering using open source visualization toolkits. Investigations have been conducted on 3D volume rendering based on visualization toolkit (VTK) generic computing and the simulation results were compared with ordinary 2D diffusion in 3D ultrasonic image. Obstructive effect was eliminated with the proposed technique by conserving information between neighboring 2D slices. The experimental results show the significant improvement of 3D diffusion on 3D ultrasound volume rendering.

Key words: Three dimensional, ultrasound, volume, diffusion, rendering, visualization toolkit (VTK), open sources.