Mattausch Oliver, Goksel Orcun
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2015;2015:6350-3. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2015.7319845.
Numerical simulation of ultrasound images can facilitate the training of sonographers. A realistic appearance of simulated ultrasonic speckle is essential for a plausible ultrasound simulation. An efficient and realistic model for ultrasonic speckle is the convolution of the ultrasound point-spread function with a parametrized distribution of point scatterers. Nevertheless, for a given arbitrary tissue, such scatterer distributions that would generate a realistic image are not known a priori, and currently there is no principled method to extract such scatterer patterns for given target tissues to be simulated. In this paper we propose to solve the inverse problem, in which an underlying scatterer map for a given sample ultrasound image is estimated. From such scatterer maps, it is also shown that a parametrization distribution model can be built, using which other instances of the same tissue can be simulated by feeding into a standard speckle generation method. This enables us to synthesize images of different tissue types from actual ultrasound images to be used in simulations with arbitrary view angles and transducer settings. We show in numerical and physical tissue-mimicking phantoms and actual physical tissue that the appearance of the synthesized images closely match the real images.
超声图像的数值模拟有助于超声检查医师的培训。逼真的模拟超声散斑对于可信的超声模拟至关重要。一种高效且逼真的超声散斑模型是超声点扩散函数与点散射体的参数化分布的卷积。然而，对于给定的任意组织，事先并不知道能生成逼真图像的此类散射体分布，而且目前尚无原理性方法来为给定的待模拟目标组织提取此类散射体模式。在本文中，我们提议解决这个逆问题，即估计给定样本超声图像的潜在散射体图。从这样的散射体图还可以看出，可以构建一个参数化分布模型，通过将其输入到标准散斑生成方法中，就能模拟同一组织的其他实例。这使我们能够从实际超声图像合成不同组织类型的图像，以用于具有任意视角和换能器设置的模拟。我们在数值和物理组织模拟体模以及实际物理组织中表明，合成图像的外观与真实图像非常匹配。
