Design and development of a mechanical linear scanning device for the three-dimensional ultrasound imaging system

Three-dimensional reconstruction from a set of a two-dimensional ultrasound image is useful for visualizing anatomy structures of an internal organ. This paper presents a mechanical linear scanning device for a three-dimensional ultrasound imaging system to acquire sequences of two-dimensional ultrasound image along with its position and orientation in three-dimensional space. The device included a linear sliding track driven by a stepper motor with a dedicated housing of a probe, a water tank with an object holder inside, and software installed on a standard computer. A mechanical sliding track enabled the two-dimensional conventional ultrasound probe moved in a regular linear manner. The mechanical linear scanning allowed fixed and predefined translation steps in z-axis direction such that rotation error could be avoided. In addition, mathematical formulations were presented to relocate every pixel’s location of the ultrasound image to the reconstruction volume in three-dimensional space. In the experiments, the device’s installation in a real environment was demonstrated, and the translation motion in space was investigated. Evaluation of the scanning results using the proposed device was performed using a bone as a phantom. The experimental result showed that the proposed device produced high quality scanning results and created high quality bone surface. Thus, it can be expected would be useful to the three-dimension reconstruction applications.