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US 2010/0249595 A1Published application
System and method for automatic calibration of tracked ultrasound
AssigneeKoninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.
InventorsSheng Xu, Jochen Kruecker
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Abstract
A system and method of tracking ultrasound transducers or probes (12) with spatial localizers (16) achieves automatic calibration with a minimum addition of hardware to that required by earlier systems. An image-based tracking algorithm localizes control points in an image space (I). An unlimited number of points can then be used for ultrasound calibration, allowing for high calibration accuracy. The proposed calibration system (10) is simple and low cost. The calibration is fast and can be carried out automatically.
Claims20
A method for automatic calibration of tracked ultrasound comprising:
- configuring a localizer (16) (i) to track a position and orientation of an ultrasound transducer (12) within a localizer space (38) and (ii) to track a position and orientation of calibration feature (18) within the localizer space;
- providing an ultrasound volume (20) suitable for transmission of ultrasound, wherein the ultrasound volume is positioned within the localizer space;
- disposing the calibration feature (18) in the ultrasound volume (20);
- acquiring a series of ultrasound images (52,54,56,58) of the ultrasound volume with the ultrasound probe as a relative positioning and orientation of the ultrasound transducer (12) and calibration feature (18) is varied;
- utilizing image processing (62,64,66,68) to determine an image-based position and orientation of the calibration feature within each frame of the series of ultrasound images;
- and
- computing transformation parameters of the tracked ultrasound calibration as a function of (i) the image-based position and orientation of the calibration feature (18) within each of the series of ultrasound images, (ii) the corresponding position and orientation of the localizer tracked ultrasound transducer (12) for each selected frame (52,54,56,58) of the series of ultrasound images, and (iii) the corresponding position and orientation of the localizer tracked calibration feature (18) for each frame of the series of ultrasound images, wherein the transformation parameters spatially relate the localizer coordinate space (L) to the ultrasound image space (I).
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