TUS-REC2024: A Challenge to Reconstruct 3D Freehand Ultrasound Without External Tracker
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jun 26, 2025
Abstract
Trackerless freehand ultrasound reconstruction aims to reconstruct 3D volumes
from sequences of 2D ultrasound images without relying on external tracking
systems, offering a low-cost, portable, and widely deployable alternative for
volumetric imaging. However, it presents significant challenges, including
accurate inter-frame motion estimation, minimisation of drift accumulation over
long sequences, and generalisability across scanning protocols. The TUS-REC2024
Challenge was established to benchmark and accelerate progress in trackerless
3D ultrasound reconstruction by providing a publicly available dataset for the
first time, along with a baseline model and evaluation framework. The Challenge
attracted over 43 registered teams, of which 6 teams submitted 21 valid
dockerized solutions. Submitted methods spanned a wide range of algorithmic
approaches, including recurrent models, registration-driven volume refinement,
attention, and physics-informed models. This paper presents an overview of the
Challenge design, summarises the key characteristics of the dataset, provides a
concise literature review, introduces the technical details of the underlying
methodology working with tracked freehand ultrasound data, and offers a
comparative analysis of submitted methods across multiple evaluation metrics.
The results highlight both the progress and current limitations of
state-of-the-art approaches in this domain, and inform directions for future
research. The data, evaluation code, and baseline are publicly available to
facilitate ongoing development and reproducibility. As a live and evolving
benchmark, this Challenge is designed to be continuously developed and
improved. The Challenge was held at MICCAI 2024 and will be organised again at
MICCAI 2025, reflecting its growing impact and the sustained commitment to
advancing this field.
