Real-time 4D ultrasound visualization with the Voreen framework

Voreen is an open source volume rendering engine which allows interactive visualization of volumetric data sets with high flexibility when integrating new visualization techniques [Meyer-Spradow et al. 2009]. It is designed with minimal overhead, so that, even for difficult processing networks, high rendering speeds can be achieved. While Voreen is well-equipped to display Cartesian volumes, volumes in polar coordinates, such as raw ultrasound beam data, currently have to be interpolated and converted to Cartesian coordinates to be displayed. This is highly time-consuming on a CPU while interpolation and volume rendering can be done on a graphics card in real-time [Sumanaweera 2004].