3D Ultrasound Spine Imaging with Application of Neural Radiance Field Method

The Voxel-Based Nearest Neighbor method (VNN) is the most commonly used three-dimensional ultrasound (US) image reconstruction algorithm for spine imaging on scoliotic patients. The neural radiance field (NeRF) method is a newly developed reconstruction algorithm in computer vision area, which utilizes a weighted multilayer perceptron to rebuild the volumetric density and color of a 3D scene. The objectives of this study are to apply the NeRF algorithm for the reconstruction of 3D US spine data and to evaluate the spinal curvature measurement from the reconstructed results. The conventional VNN and NeRF method were used to reconstruct 3D ultrasound volume data for 25 scoliotic subjects. The mean absolute difference (MAD) between different reconstruction methods and the correlation between US and radiographic measurements were calculated. The result demonstrated that the new 3D reconstruction algorithm based on the NeRF algorithm could provide higher-quality 3D US spine images with highlighted bone structures and lower noise, moreover lead to better estimation of spine curves with smaller errors comparing to the VNN method.