A software package for portable three-dimensional ultrasound imaging

Currently, portable ultrasound units lack 3-dimensional (3D) image display, which limits their usefulness especially under hostile operating environments where information must be intuitive and objective. A freehand 3D image processing and visualization software package, Ultra3D, has been developed and tested, especially to work with a miniaturized linear-array transducer probe that is connected to a laptop PC. This paper presents the software design and method to integrate into miniaturized probe to achieve freehand 3D ultrasound imaging.