Tele-ultrasound through teleoperation allows experts to perform examinations remotely in communities, but limited connectivity can lead to communication delays that reduce usability and diagnostic performance. Visual-haptic model mediated teleoperation reslices a pre-acquired ultrasound volume in real time to provide an accurate, delay-independent preview image for the sonographer. This enables fast and robust exploration before using the live image for fine tuning. However, existing reslicing techniques do not account for the directional nature of ultrasound - the fact that a structure looks different when imaged from different directions. This paper presents Directionality-Aware Reslicing (DARE), an ultrasound volume reconstruction and reslicing framework that takes directionality into account. The presented GPU-accelerated algorithm allows real-time reslicing from arbitrary viewpoints to generate accurate preview images. The method is evaluated quantitatively through image similarity metrics and qualitatively through a user study, and significantly outperforms existing reslicing methods in image similarity and realism compared to a ground truth. This can improve the effectiveness and robustness of tele-ultrasound in low-resource areas.

翻译：通过远程操作实现的远程超声技术使专家能够在社区环境中远程进行检查，但有限的网络连接可能导致通信延迟，从而降低可用性和诊断性能。基于视觉-触觉模型中介的远程操作技术可实时对预先采集的超声容积进行重切片，为超声医师提供精确且不受延迟影响的预览图像。这使得操作者能够在使用实时图像进行精细调整之前，实现快速且稳健的探索。然而，现有重切片技术未考虑超声的方向特性——即同一结构从不同方向成像时呈现不同外观的事实。本文提出方向感知重切片框架（DARE），一种考虑方向性的超声容积重建与重切片框架。所提出的GPU加速算法支持从任意视角进行实时重切片，生成精确的预览图像。通过图像相似度指标进行定量评估，并通过用户研究进行定性评估，该框架在图像相似度和真实感方面显著优于现有重切片方法。这将提升资源匮乏地区远程超声技术的有效性和鲁棒性。