arXiv subjects

Donald Peebles

Publications and source records attributed to Donald Peebles.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Measuring proximity to standard planes during fetal brain ultrasound scanning

This paper presents a pipeline designed to bring ultrasound (US) plane pose estimation closer to clinical use, demonstrating the feasibility of continuous, real-time proximity feedback for navigation to the standard planes (SPs) in the fetal brain. We propose a semi-supervised segmentation model that uses labeled SPs and unlabeled slices from 3D US volumes (non-SPs), achieving 0.93 mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) on SPs and 0.86 mIoU on arbitrary non-SPs. The model incorporates a classification mechanism to identify and filter out frames lacking the fetal brain, and to generate masks for those containing it, enhancing the relevance of plane pose regression in clinical settings. Combined with 6D plane pose regression, our pipeline provides sensorless, continuous proximity detection to SPs with real-time distance metrics rather than binary plane recognition. Furthermore, we validate its translational viability by deploying the system on an NVIDIA Clara AGX edge device, achieving a real-time inference speed of 39 Hz, which exceeds standard clinical acquisition rates. Unlike prior methods validated on curated volume slices, we evaluate the pipeline retrospectively on real fetal scan videos from 17 sonographers of varying expertise: operators freeze near, rather than exactly at, the local minima of the proximity signal, consistent with clinical freeze-timing behavior, whereas proximity alone does not predict expert SP quality scores. The approach complements existing fetal US technologies and is a step toward image-based navigation support in prenatal scanning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Ultrasound Plane Pose Regression: Assessing Generalized Pose Coordinates in the Fetal Brain

In obstetric ultrasound (US) scanning, the learner's ability to mentally build a three-dimensional (3D) map of the fetus from a two-dimensional (2D) US image represents a significant challenge in skill acquisition. We aim to build a US plane localization system for 3D visualization, training, and guidance without integrating additional sensors. This work builds on top of our previous work, which predicts the six-dimensional (6D) pose of arbitrarily oriented US planes slicing the fetal brain with respect to a normalized reference frame using a convolutional neural network (CNN) regression network. Here, we analyze in detail the assumptions of the normalized fetal brain reference frame and quantify its accuracy with respect to the acquisition of transventricular (TV) standard plane (SP) for fetal biometry. We investigate the impact of registration quality in the training and testing data and its subsequent effect on trained models. Finally, we introduce data augmentations and larger training sets that improve the results of our previous work, achieving median errors of 2.97 mm and 6.63 degrees for translation and rotation, respectively.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

A Log-Euclidean and Total Variation based Variational Framework for Computational Sonography

We propose a spatial compounding technique and variational framework to improve 3D ultrasound image quality by compositing multiple ultrasound volumes acquired from different probe orientations. In the composite volume, instead of intensity values, we estimate a tensor at every voxel. The resultant tensor image encapsulates the directional information of the underlying imaging data and can be used to generate ultrasound volumes from arbitrary, potentially unseen, probe positions. Extending the work of Hennersperger et al., we introduce a log-Euclidean framework to ensure that the tensors are positive-definite, eventually ensuring non-negative images. Additionally, we regularise the underpinning ill-posed variational problem while preserving edge information by relying on a total variation penalisation of the tensor field in the log domain. We present results on in vivo human data to show the efficacy of the approach.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

Similarity Registration Problems for 2D/3D Ultrasound Calibration

We propose a minimal solution for the similarity registration (rigid pose and scale) between two sets of 3D lines, and also between a set of co-planar points and a set of 3D lines. The first problem is solved up to 8 discrete solutions with a minimum of 2 line-line correspondences, while the second is solved up to 4 discrete solutions using 4 point-line correspondences. We use these algorithms to perform the extrinsic calibration between a pose tracking sensor and a 2D/3D ultrasound (US) curvilinear probe using a tracked needle as calibration target. The needle is tracked as a 3D line, and is scanned by the ultrasound as either a 3D line (3D US) or as a 2D point (2D US). Since the scale factor that converts US scan units to metric coordinates is unknown, the calibration is formulated as a similarity registration problem. We present results with both synthetic and real data and show that the minimum solutions outperform the correspondent non-minimal linear formulations.

cs.CV↗