Screen Tracking for Clinical Translation of Live Ultrasound Image Analysis Methods
This addresses the problem of integrating automated analysis into ultrasound exams for clinicians, though it is incremental as it builds on existing tracking and image processing methods.
The authors tackled the challenge of translating live ultrasound image analysis to clinical settings by proposing a camera-based screen tracking framework that extracts and reformats ultrasound images in 87.66 ± 3.73 ms on average, enabling real-time processing without hardware modifications.
Ultrasound (US) imaging is one of the most commonly used non-invasive imaging techniques. However, US image acquisition requires simultaneous guidance of the transducer and interpretation of images, which is a highly challenging task that requires years of training. Despite many recent developments in intra-examination US image analysis, the results are not easy to translate to a clinical setting. We propose a generic framework to extract the US images and superimpose the results of an analysis task, without any need for physical connection or alteration to the US system. The proposed method captures the US image by tracking the screen with a camera fixed at the sonographer's view point and reformats the captured image to the right aspect ratio, in 87.66 +- 3.73ms on average. It is hypothesized that this would enable to input such retrieved image into an image processing pipeline to extract information that can help improve the examination. This information could eventually be projected back to the sonographer's field of view in real time using, for example, an augmented reality (AR) headset.