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

TL;DR

PRETUS is a flexible, open-source platform enabling real-time ultrasound image analysis through plug-ins, supporting rapid development and testing of new imaging methods across different ultrasound devices.

Contribution

It introduces a lightweight, plug-in based software platform for real-time ultrasound imaging research that is manufacturer-agnostic and supports rapid prototyping.

Findings

Supports real-time ultrasound image capture and analysis

Allows concurrent plug-in execution without blocking

Provides tutorials for plug-in development

Abstract

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.