Software development for low cost, high quality, real-time 4D ultrasound imaging system on personal computers (PCs)

Real-time ultrasound imaging modality is the system which can meet sonographers dreams. However, until recently it was not possible to develop this type of ultrasound machines at all. This was down to the lack of adequate hardware and software platforms that make the developers capable of implementing interactive volume reconstruction. Despite hardware availability in that time, this hardware was not widespread in the market, as well as components´ cost was too expensive. Consequently, ultrasound systems´ overall cost was very expensive. Besides that, software development was a tedious matter in the past. This was a consequence of the limited functionality of the fixed function pipeline on the available graphics cards in that time. Explicitly speaking, the real problem in an interactive 3D ultrasound lies in the massive data sets to be processed and rendered per second. All of these reasons made the developers waiting for affordable and flexible hardware that can make them capable of developing and manufacturing low cost and high performance 4D ultrasound machines that support interactive 3D volume visualization.