Novel Similarity Metric for Image-Based Out-Of-Plane Motion Estimation in 3D Ultrasound

Over the past decade, Freehand 3D Ultrasound(US) reconstruction using only image information has become a widely researched topic because it eliminates the need for an external tracking system and provides real-time volumetric information. But most of the state-of-art methods are inhibited by their inability to find a simple and robust similarity metric that could learn and estimate the spatial transformation between two US slices in a US sweep. In this work, we propose a novel similarity metric (TexSimAR), which computes the similarity value between two consecutive US images by correlating the parametric representation of the image-texture instead of the image itself. The purpose of this approach is to capture and compare the dynamics in the texture characteristics of two US images. We modelled these dynamics using a parametrical auto-regressive (AR) model. Experiments were performed on forearm datasets of three subjects. For every pair of consecutive US slices, we computed our TexSimAR similarity value and out-of-plane transformation from the ground truth to train a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based regression model, which was then used to predict the out-of-plane transformation with the similarity value as input. The proposed method shows promising results with predictions better than state-of-the-art methods even with 1/8^th of training data compared to other methods in the literature.