ULTRASOUND IMAGING WITH RAY CASTING AND SOFTWARE-BASED IMAGE RECONSTRUCTION

Systems and methods are presented for increasing the frame rate of real-time 3D ultrasound imaging. In one embodiment, the frame rate for generating a pseudo-shaded 2D projection image may be increased by controlling the image reconstruction process. Rather than beamforming, scan converting, and interpolating a 3D voxelized data set of an entire scanned volume, only samples required for generating the 2D projection image may be reconstructed. The element data measured from each transducer array element may be combined to directly reconstruct those 3D image samples required by the volume rendering algorithm to generate the 2D projection image.