Bayesian Estimation of Sparse Smooth Speckle Shape Models for Motion Tracking in Medical Ultrasound
 
Bayesian Estimation of Sparse Smooth Speckle Shape Models for Motion Tracking in Medical Ultrasound 
 
Shaun Bundervoet, Colas Schretter, Ann Dooms, Peter Schelkens
 
Abstract 

Emerging ultrasound phased-array technologies will soon enable the acquisition of high-resolution 3D+T images for medical applications. Processing the huge amount of spatiotemporal measurements remains a practical challenge. In this work, dynamic ultrasound images are sparsely represented by a mixture of moving speckles. We model the shape of a speckle and its locally linear motion with a weighted multivariate Gaussian kernel. Parameters of the model are estimated with online Bayesian learning from a stream of random measurements. In our preliminary experiments with a simulated phantom of a moving cylindrical structure, the optical flow of speckles is estimated for a vertical line profile and compared to the ground truth. The mean accuracy of the linear motion estimate is of 93.53%, using only a statistically sufficient random subset of the data.