A 3D Slicer module which enhances bone in US images. It is possible to test the module from 3D Slicer pressing Reload and Test, which uses a lumbar spine US volume (available in MIDAS).

The module uses OpenMP and Intel MKL. A free trial of Intel MKL can be downloaded from here:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-mkl/try-buy

Also, remember to add the Intel MKL dlls to your path: ...\mkl\redist\intel64\mkl, ...\mkl\redist\intel64\compiler.

One more thing: the Intel MKL code uses double data at this moment.

This section gives details about the algorithms currently available.

Foroughi, P., et al. (2007) Ultrasound bone segmentation using dynamic programming. IEEE Ultrason Symp 13(4):2523–2526 (with some modifications).

Parameters:

• blurredVSBLoG - Controlls the ratio between the Gaussian blurring and the Laplacian of Gaussian.

• boneThreshold - Defines the probability threshold for a pixel to be considered bone or not.

• shadowSigma - Standard deviation of the Gaussian weighting function which models the transition of high intensity pixels close to bone surface to the dark pixels deeper under the bone.

• shadowVSIntensity - Controls the ratio between the shadow map and the reflection number.

• smoothingSigma - Defines the size of the Gaussian kernel used for blurring.

• transducerMargin - Defines the number of rows to exclude from the top part of the image (close to the transducer head).