A Robust and Fast Calibration Method for Biplane Ultrasound Transducer

Spatial calibration for the ultrasound probe is essential in all the image-guided therapy applications that use freehand ultrasound (US), especially in robot-assisted therapy. Recently, although many calibration techniques using different phantoms, trackers, feature extraction methods and optimization algorithms have been proposed, an analysis of the calibration methodology for the biplane transducer with the unique geometry is still lacking. Therefore, this paper presents a reliable and rapid calibration method for prostate biplane transducer which takes advantage of special phantom. We proposed an iterative method to get the optimized calibration result, and also make use of the uniqueness of rigid transformation between the two imaging planes as the constraints to increase the calibration accuracy. We use 70 ultrasound pictures to do the experiment, the error is 1.09 mm.