Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year (2017-2018 to 2018-2019).

The objectives of this project are to develop and validate tools to use ultrasound for medical imaging by a)x000D
developing an algorithm based on an inertia sensor, consisting of a 3 axis-accelerometer, a 3-axis gyroscopex000D
and a 3-axis magnetometer, which is embedded inside the ultrasound probe to estimate the trajectory ofx000D
ultrasound scan, b) integrating the trajectory information with 2D ultrasound scanned images to reconstruct 3Dx000D
images and c) establishing the accuracy of the 3D reconstructed images. The developed algorithm will providex000D
scientific underpinning for Clarius' promotion of their ultrasound system for 3D images reconstruction. Thex000D
current ultrasound system from Clarius is a handheld device which uses Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth to connectx000D
to an iOS or Android smart device to display 2D images. The data from the accelerometer, gyroscope andx000D
magnetometer are sent to the smart device at 60 Hz with 14-bit resolution. Clarius has not yet implemented thex000D
inertia sensor data to provide position and orientation information. Integration of the gyroscope measurementsx000D
plus the magnetometer data should accurately estimate the orientation. The calculated orientation will bex000D
combined with the accelerometer data which subtracts the earth's gravity information and perform a doublex000D
integration to estimate the position. However, since the inertial measurements are usually noisy and biased, thex000D
integration steps from angular velocity to rotation and from acceleration to position will introduce integrationx000D
drift. To minimize the integration drift, a periodic reset or capturing data in a short period of time may resolvex000D
the drifting problem.