Ultrasound Medical Imaging Techniques
Danilo Avola, Luigi Cinque, Alessio Fagioli, Gianluca Foresti, Alessio Mecca
Abstract
Ultrasound (US) imaging for medical purposes has been increasing in popularity over the years. The US technology has some valuable strengths, such as it is harmless, very cheap, and can provide real-time feedback. At the same time, it has also some drawbacks that the research in this field is trying to mitigate, such as the high level of noise and the low quality of the images. This survey aims at presenting the advances in the techniques used for US medical imaging. It describes the studies on the different organs that the US uses the most and tries to categorize the research in this field into three groups, i.e., segmentation, classification, and miscellaneous. This latter group includes the works that either provide aid during surgical operations or try to enhance the quality of the acquired US images/volumes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first review that analyzes the different techniques exploited on a large selection of body locations (i.e., brain, thyroid, heart, breast, fetal, and prostate) in the three sub-fields of research.