Title: On the Localization of Ultrasound Image Slices within Point Distribution Models Show Chinese title

Title: 在点分布模型中超声图像切片的定位

Abstract: Thyroid disorders are most commonly diagnosed using high-resolution Ultrasound (US). Longitudinal nodule tracking is a pivotal diagnostic protocol for monitoring changes in pathological thyroid morphology. This task, however, imposes a substantial cognitive load on clinicians due to the inherent challenge of maintaining a mental 3D reconstruction of the organ. We thus present a framework for automated US image slice localization within a 3D shape representation to ease how such sonographic diagnoses are carried out. Our proposed method learns a common latent embedding space between US image patches and the 3D surface of an individual's thyroid shape, or a statistical aggregation in the form of a statistical shape model (SSM), via contrastive metric learning. Using cross-modality registration and Procrustes analysis, we leverage features from our model to register US slices to a 3D mesh representation of the thyroid shape. We demonstrate that our multi-modal registration framework can localize images on the 3D surface topology of a patient-specific organ and the mean shape of an SSM. Experimental results indicate slice positions can be predicted within an average of 1.2 mm of the ground-truth slice location on the patient-specific 3D anatomy and 4.6 mm on the SSM, exemplifying its usefulness for slice localization during sonographic acquisitions. Code is publically available: \href{https://github.com/vuenc/slice-to-shape}{https://github.com/vuenc/slice-to-shape} Show Chinese abstract

Abstract: 甲状腺疾病最常通过高分辨率超声（US）进行诊断。 纵向结节跟踪是监测病理性甲状腺形态变化的关键诊断协议。 然而，由于保持器官的三维重建存在固有挑战，这项任务会给临床医生带来较大的认知负担。 因此，我们提出了一种框架，用于在三维形状表示中自动定位US图像切片，以简化此类超声诊断的进行。 我们提出的方法通过对比度度量学习，在US图像块与个体甲状腺形状的三维表面或统计形状模型（SSM）形式的统计聚合之间学习一个共同的潜在嵌入空间。 利用跨模态配准和普罗克鲁斯特分析，我们利用模型中的特征将US切片配准到甲状腺形状的三维网格表示。 我们证明了我们的多模态配准框架可以将图像定位在患者特定器官的三维表面拓扑结构以及SSM的平均形状上。 实验结果表明，在患者特定的三维解剖结构上，切片位置的预测平均误差为1.2毫米，在SSM上为4.6毫米，证明了其在超声采集过程中切片定位的实用性。 代码已公开： \href{https://github.com/vuenc/slice-to-shape}{https://github.com/vuenc/slice-to-shape}