From Slices to Structures: Unsupervised 3D Reconstruction of Female Pelvic Anatomy from Freehand Transvaginal Ultrasound

Volumetric ultrasound has the potential to significantly improve diagnostic accuracy and clinical decision-making, yet its widespread adoption remains limited by dependence on specialized hardware and restrictive acquisition protocols. In this work, we present a novel unsupervised framework for reconstructing 3D anatomical structures from freehand 2D transvaginal ultrasound (TVS) sweeps, without requiring external tracking or learned pose estimators. Our method adapts the principles of Gaussian Splatting to the domain of ultrasound, introducing a slice-aware, differentiable rasterizer tailored to the unique physics and geometry of ultrasound imaging. We model anatomy as a collection of anisotropic 3D Gaussians and optimize their parameters directly from image-level supervision, leveraging sensorless probe motion estimation and domain-specific geometric priors. The result is a compact, flexible, and memory-efficient volumetric representation that captures anatomical detail with high spatial fidelity. This work demonstrates that accurate 3D reconstruction from 2D ultrasound images can be achieved through purely computational means, offering a scalable alternative to conventional 3D systems and enabling new opportunities for AI-assisted analysis and diagnosis.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich)
Published
2025-08-20
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-c-000791997
Primary Topic
3D Shape Modeling and Analysis
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

From Slices to Structures: Unsupervised 3D Reconstruction of Female Pelvic Anatomy from Freehand Transvaginal Ultrasound

Julia E. Vogt, Fabian Laumer, Max Krähenmann, Sergio Tascon-Morales et al.
Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich)
3D Shape Modeling and Analysis
article

From Slices to Structures: Unsupervised 3D Reconstruction of Female Pelvic Anatomy from Freehand Transvaginal Ultrasound

Julia E. Vogt, Fabian Laumer, Max Krähenmann, Sergio Tascon-Morales, Ece Özkan Elsen
article en

Abstract

Volumetric ultrasound has the potential to significantly improve diagnostic accuracy and clinical decision-making, yet its widespread adoption remains limited by dependence on specialized hardware and restrictive acquisition protocols. In this work, we present a novel unsupervised framework for reconstructing 3D anatomical structures from freehand 2D transvaginal ultrasound (TVS) sweeps, without requiring external tracking or learned pose estimators. Our method adapts the principles of Gaussian Splatting to the domain of ultrasound, introducing a slice-aware, differentiable rasterizer tailored to the unique physics and geometry of ultrasound imaging. We model anatomy as a collection of anisotropic 3D Gaussians and optimize their parameters directly from image-level supervision, leveraging sensorless probe motion estimation and domain-specific geometric priors. The result is a compact, flexible, and memory-efficient volumetric representation that captures anatomical detail with high spatial fidelity. This work demonstrates that accurate 3D reconstruction from 2D ultrasound images can be achieved through purely computational means, offering a scalable alternative to conventional 3D systems and enabling new opportunities for AI-assisted analysis and diagnosis.

Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich)
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3D Shape Modeling and Analysis
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From Slices to Structures: Unsupervised 3D Reconstruction of Female Pelvic Anatomy from Freehand Transvaginal Ultrasound — Julia E. Vogt, Fabian Laumer, et al. · Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS