3D Reconstruction of the prostate from transrectal ultrasound images

This paper presents an algorithm to reconstruct the 3D-shading image of the prostate from a series of ultrasound cross-sectional images of the organ. In the proposed method, the image is first smoothed by direction-based low pass filtering. The center of the prostate is estimated and then a search process radiated from the estimated center is performed to locate the prostate boundary by using matched filtering. Next edge linking including a prior knowledge is employed to obtain the 2D contour. The Hermite-surface approach is used to interpolate the spatial data to reconstruct 3D object's surface from a series of 2D contours. The diffuse reflection and Gouraud shading are used to create the depth effect of the 3D images of the prostate. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm work well on our data and can be applied on similar data without intervention most of the time.