Study of image location for the high intensity focused ultrasound therapy system

High intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is one of promising non invasive thermal ablation techniques of tumor, and the demand of imaging for guidance the HIFU procedure is becoming important. We choose ultrasound imaging method based on sequence images to locate the focal position of the HIFU. To the characteristic of ultrasound sequence images, we adopt a diffusion stick method for speckle noise suppression in ultrasonic images, and improve the discrete active contour method by adding external force in segmenting sequence ultrasonic images. The experiments of clinical ultrasonic images show that the techniques are effective. The next work is to reconstruct the processed sequence images into volume data for visualization and guidance the therapy procedure.