A phantom with reduced complexity for spatial 3-D ultrasound calibration

The design of a new phantom for 3-D ultrasound calibration is presented. The phantom provides a viable alternative to existing phantoms that are significantly more complex and require high precision fabrication. The phantom, referred to as a "plane-of-wires" phantom, consists of two wires mounted at the same fixed height above the bottom of a water tank. Data collection for calibration involved rotating and translating the phantom so that the wires remained in a single plane parallel to the tank bottom. The mean reconstruction accuracy of the plane-of-wires calibration is 0.66 mm at a mean depth of 12.3 mm, with a precision of 1.23 mm at the same mean depth. The calibration was used to determine the volume of a cube with known volume with an error of 2.51%. The calibration performance achieved is comparable with that of existing approaches.