Case Study: Visualization of 3D Ultrasonic Data

3D Ultrasound is one of the most interesting non-invasive, non-radiative tomographic techniques. Rendering 3D modells from such data is not straight-forward due to the noisy, fuzzy nature of ultrasound imaging containing a lot of artefacts. In this paper we first apply speckle, median and gaussian pre-filtering to improve the image quality. Using several semi-automatic segmentation tools we isolate interesting features within a few minutes. Our improved surface-extraction procedure enables volume rendering of high quality within a few seconds on a normal workstation, thus making the complete system suitable for routine clinical applications.