Needle Detection in In-Plane-Acquired 3D Ultrasound Image Volumes Using Stick Filtering and a Heuristic

Abstract

We propose an image-based method to estimate the needle axis parameters in 3D ultrasound data although the needle is shown as flat, broad shape due to ultrasound elevation beam-width artifacts in ultrasound volumes. For this, ultrasound volumes are correlated with small 3D sticks of various azimuth and polar angles. The maximal correlation magnitude assigns the orientation of one of the sticks to each voxel position. Voxels of similar angles are clustered and modeled as lines by l₂-norm minimization. The method was applied to 44 3D ultrasound volumes showing a 16G needle which was pushed into pork liver. The estimated location and orientation of the needle axes coincide well with expert defined ”reference” needles, as median (97%-quantile) estimation errors for orientation ≤ 1.24^◦ (≤ 5.16^◦) and distance between needle tip and axis ≤ 0.53mm (≤ 1.16mm) indicate.