Assessment of panoramic ultrasound reconstruction imaging using telemedicine equipment: A phantom experiment

Abstract

Telemedicine is one of the most important technologies and services nowadays to overcome face-to-face consultation or intervention, especially, in rural areas. Teleultrasound monitoring is a service that has been useful for lung, thyroid or liver monitoring. In particular, one of the most promising protocols to attend this type of monitoring is sending asynchronous acquired ultrasound videos following the volume sweep imaging protocol; however, one of the main limitations is the poor internet bandwidth that does not allow sending files with a large amount of information. For this reason, in this work, it was proposed to send a single image that includes all the information of the acquisition using panoramic reconstruction of the ultrasound video. To perform the experiments, an ultrasound phantom was used with the commercially available ultrasound scanner with a linear transducer at different acquisition depths of 2.5, 3.7, 4.9, 6.1 and 7.4 cm. For the reconstructions, three phases were used detection of the acquisition moment, by means of optical flow; image processing for the selection of the region of interest and intensity adjustment; and panoramic reconstruction determining the displacement between frames. It was observed that this was successful for the deeper and higher contrast acquisitions.