[Real-time volume rendering of medical 3D dynamic ultrasound]

Dynamic 3D ultrasound is a very promising technology for clinical use, but not being a Cartesian 3D dataset, 3D ultrasound data can not be visualized directly with real-time volume rendering accelerated by 3D texture hardware. In this paper, fast volume rendering using 3D texture hardware acceleration is introduced and modern PC graphics card architecture analyzed. A modified method is proposed to obtain real-time volume rendering of dynamic 3D ultrasound data by programming vertex shader in GPU. Experimental results show that 3D ultrasound data can be rendered with real-time speed in normal PC platform. The method can be widely applied in future 3D dynamic ultrasound clinical research.