Compact and Wireless Freehand 3D Ultrasound Real-time Spine Imaging System: A pilot study

The 3D ultrasound reconstruction technology has led to a rapid development of ultrasound spine imaging in recent decades. However, the current imaging apparatus is bulky and not portable. The objective of this study is to develop a new compact and wireless system to offer the real-time visualized spine images during data acquisition. A portable and WI-FI based ultrasound scanner and a compact EM tracking system were assembled to acquire ultrasound transverse frames with location information which could be reconstructed into 3D spine image volume in real-time. The validation was implemented on the 2D coronal images of vertebra phantoms, and the in vivo data acquisition and reconstruction were demonstrated on volunteers. The result showed that the new system could provide reconstructed spine images in real time and the average errors of the reconstructed images were about 1mm (approximate to image pixel size).