Patent ID: 8059914

Claim:
A method for preprocessing ultrasound imaging, comprising the steps of: calculating uniformity of each of line segments centering at current voxel and within a neighborhood centering at the same voxel and having a radius R to select the most uniform N directional lines as 2N tangent vectors and the most nonuniform directional line as a normal line, in order to finally form a multivalue vector field after all voxels are involved in the calculation; and smoothing all volume data of each voxel, further comprising: applying a mean filtering to all gradients in the neighborhood having a radius r; the gradient being the maximum nonuniformity represented by the normal line of each voxel; if the mean filtered gradient for the current voxel is smaller than a predetermined threshold, calculating and assigning the mean gray-scale value of the neighborhood to the current voxel; and, if the mean filtered gradient for the current voxel is not smaller than the predetermined threshold, marching from the current voxel along 2N directions of the multivalue vector field respectively to generate 2N branches in total to finally form a tree-like structure; and calculating a mean gray-scale value of all voxels on the tree-like structure and assigning the mean gray-scale value to the current voxel to realize smoothing of the volume data.