I’m currently exploring how reinforcement learning can be applied to autonomous ultrasound scanning. As part of my research, I’m looking for publicly available 3D volumes of cardiac ultrasound that I can use in 3D Slicer to simulate ultrasound images and corresponding probe interactions. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to a real environment at the moment to collect actual scanning data and trajectories.
Could anyone kindly point me to any resources or public datasets for cardiac ultrasound volumes that could help with this task?
If you install SlicerHeart extension then you’ll get a couple of 4D cardiac ultrasound image series in the Sample Data module.
However, if you plan to position a 2D probe then you probably want to get actual 2D ultrasound images for training, because you cannot accurately simulate 2D ultrasound images by reslicing a 3D ultrasound volume (they have very different image resolution, beam thickness, frame rate, direction of sound relative to image plane normal, shape and size of the transducer, etc.).