Fast B-mode ultrasound image simulation of deformed tissue

This paper presents a fast image synthesis procedure inside elastic volumes under deformation simulated by the finite element method (FEM). Given the node displacements of a mesh and the 3D image voxel data of a volume prior to deformation, the method maps the image pixels, to be synthesized, from the deformed configuration back to the nominal pre-deformed configuration, where the pixel intensities are obtained easily through interpolation in the regular-grid structure of the voxel volume. This mapping requires the identification of the mesh element enclosing each image pixel, in order to use its corresponding shape function for smooth interpolation. To accelerate this point location operation, a fast method of marking the projection of the deformed mesh on the image pixels at every frame is introduced. In order to evaluate our method, a deformable tissue phantom was constructed and its 3D ultrasound volume was acquired in its nominal state. B-mode images of the phantom were then synthesized under the simulated deformation of an ultrasound probe. Results show that realistic B-mode images can be simulated in real-time with the proposed technique, even under large deformations. The technique is also implemented on a real-time system for ultrasound exploration with deformation.