Rapid, easy and reliable calibration for freehand 3D ultrasound

This paper presents improvements to the plane-based technique for calibrating freehand 3D ultrasound systems. The improvements are designed to make it easier for inexperienced users to perform plane-based calibration and to know that they have got a reliable result. In particular, we enable the calibration to be performed using water at room temperature while producing a result that is valid for average soft tissue and we show how it is possible to provide feedback on the reliability of the calibration using a metric based on the curvature of the calibration criterion function. We present comprehensive results showing that these innovations improve the precision of the calibration and offer useful feedback to the user.