Design and test of a PC-based portable three-dimensional ultrasound software system Ultra3D

Currently, portable ultrasound units lack three-dimensional (3D) image display, limiting their potential usefulness especially under remote and 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 Ultra3D into Terason's miniaturized SmartProbe for freehand 3D ultrasound imaging. Since images generated by Ultra3D are in a digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) format, data sharing with others is easy.