Lymph Node Navigation in the Head and Neck Area Using 3D Ultrasound Images

The aftercare of head and neck carcinoma patients is laborious because the physician needs to locate each lymph node in 2D ultrasound for analysis. 3D ultrasound context information can be utilized to navigate in the head neck area automatically. We review methods for using context information in medical imaging in the literature, discuss the characteristics of ultrasound and the head-neck area and present four distinct approaches for locating small structures in ultrasound images. The focus is placed on two approaches: locating small structures by using bright and dark regions in the images and using PatchMatch, a correspondence algorithm for image patches, for constructing a nearest neighbour field that is used to estimated an image transform between follow-up images. Experimentally we find that the PatchMatch approach yields promising results and using bright and dark regions does not work robustly on all image configurations.