IN-VITRO 3D RECONSTRUCTION OF LONG BONES USING B-SCAN IMAGE-PROCESSING

An echographic image processing method has been developed, and validat ed by in vitro experiments, for the 3D reconstruction of the long bone s of the newborn. The reconstruction of successive parallel crops-sect ions is obtained by a 2D reconstruction technique using radial B-scan image processing. The automatic segmentation of all the calculated ima ges allows the extraction of the external contours of the skeleton. Af ter structuring the explored volume using a contour association method , a contour interpolation step is required to solve the anisotropy pro blem, to obtain a 3D-representation with cubic voxel lists. The result s are encouraging, and a new mechanical part prototype of the acquisit ion system is under test for in vivo experiments. The main originality of the paper lies in the combination of different steps to obtain a p ractical solution to a clinical problem.