PRETUS: A plug-in based platform for real-time ultrasound imaging research

14 Sep 2021  ·  Alberto Gomez, Veronika A. Zimmer, Gavin Wheeler, Nicolas Toussaint, Shujie Deng, Robert Wright, Emily Skelton, Jackie Matthew, Bernhard Kainz, Jo Hajnal, Julia Schnabel ·

We present PRETUS -a Plugin-based Real Time UltraSound software platform for live ultrasound image analysis and operator support. The software is lightweight; functionality is brought in via independent plug-ins that can be arranged in sequence. The software allows to capture the real-time stream of ultrasound images from virtually any ultrasound machine, applies computational methods and visualises the results on-the-fly. Plug-ins can run concurrently without blocking each other. They can be implemented in C ++ and Python. A graphical user interface can be implemented for each plug-in, and presented to the user in a compact way. The software is free and open source, and allows for rapid prototyping and testing of real-time ultrasound imaging methods in a manufacturer-agnostic fashion. The software is provided with input, output and processing plug-ins, as well as with tutorials to illustrate how to develop new plug-ins for PRETUS.

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Medical Physics Software Engineering 65-04 (Primary), 92C55 (Secondary)