title: Alignment and calibration of dual ultrasound transducers using a wedge phantom.
abstract: We present a novel method of aligning two orthogonal ultrasound transducers into a coincident scan plane. A wedge phantom design provides visual feedback to the user to facilitate alignment. Calibration provides the transformation from one transducer to the other as well as a measure of the residual error in alignment. Mean alignment error is shown to be under 1° in the rotation axes and 1 mm in translation after repeated manual alignments. The repeatability of wedge based calibration has similar results compared with N-fiducial based calibration. The accuracy of the calibration for mapping points from one transducer to the other is found to have a mean error of 1.6 mm. The dual transducer system is well suited to imaging anatomy such as the breast and may be used for spatial compounding for improving B-mode images and motion estimation compounding for improving elastography results.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. jeffa@ece.ubc.ca
authors.forename: Jeffrey M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Abeysekera
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Rohling
mesh_terms: D002138:Calibration; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D014159:Transducers; D014465:Ultrasonics / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*