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

Interactive volume visualization was a dream that can't easily and cheaply be achieved in the past. This was due to the lack of the high performance graphics hardware that capable us of developing real-time 4D ultrasound machines. Current state-of-the-art low cost consumer graphics chips afford a level of programmability and performance that makes it possible to easily develop interactive volume visualization on them. Processing powers of the these chips has increased so much that today we can get real-time ultrasound equipment to acquire and display the 3D datasets with their multi-planar reformations and renderings in real time. In this project we are going to exploit the great programming capability of one of the available nvidia graphics cards chips to implement a texture-based volume rendering techniques on it, seeking for developing applicable software that achieve real-time and interactive ultrasound volume visualization. Writing software is an easy job, but exploiting the ultimate hardware capabilities for developing bugless (as possible) and suitable software for real-time performance is the real hard target we are trying to achieve in this project. Reaching this target in this project will give us the spark to put our efforts towards a final product; it is Real-time 4D ultrasound machine.