Purpose. Given the high level of expertise required for navigation and interpretation of ultrasound images, computational simulations can facilitate the training of such skills in virtual reality. With ray-tracing based simulations, realistic ultrasound images can be generated. However, due to computational constraints for interactivity, image quality typically needs to be compromised. Methods. We propose herein to bypass any rendering and simulation process at interactive time, by conducting such simulations during a non-time-critical offline stage and then learning image translation from cross-sectional model slices to such simulated frames. We use a generative adversarial framework with a dedicated generator architecture and input feeding scheme, which both substantially improve image quality without increase in network parameters. Integral attenuation maps derived from cross-sectional model slices, texture-friendly strided convolutions, providing stochastic noise and input maps to intermediate layers in order to preserve locality are all shown herein to greatly facilitate such translation task. Results. Given several quality metrics, the proposed method with only tissue maps as input is shown to provide comparable or superior results to a state-of-the-art that uses additional images of low-quality ultrasound renderings. An extensive ablation study shows the need and benefits from the individual contributions utilized in this work, based on qualitative examples and quantitative ultrasound similarity metrics. To that end, a local histogram statistics based error metric is proposed and demonstrated for visualization of local dissimilarities between ultrasound images.

中文翻译：

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从横断面模型切片中学习超声渲染以进行模拟训练

目的。鉴于导航和解释超声图像所需的高水平专业知识，计算模拟可以促进在虚拟现实中对此类技能的培训。使用基于光线跟踪的模拟，可以生成逼真的超声图像。但是，由于交互性的计算限制，通常需要降低图像质量。方法。我们在这里提出通过在非时间关键的离线阶段进行此类模拟，然后学习将图像从横截面模型切片转换为此类模拟帧的方法，来绕过交互时间的任何渲染和模拟过程。我们使用具有专用生成器架构和输入馈送方案的生成对抗框架，这两种方法都可以在不增加网络参数的情况下显着提高图像质量。从横截面模型切片，纹理友好的跨步卷积（提供随机噪声）到中间层以保持局部性的输入图得出的整体衰减图均在此处显示，以极大地促进此类转换任务。结果。给定几个质量指标，所显示的仅以组织图作为输入的拟议方法显示出与使用低质量超声渲染的其他图像的最新技术具有可比或更好的结果。广泛的消融研究表明，基于定性示例和定量超声相似性指标，这项工作中使用的个人贡献的必要性和益处。为此，提出并证明了基于局部直方图统计的误差度量，用于可视化超声图像之间的局部差异。