If you want to improve ultrasound, combine it with the positioning sensors of a VR system so the position of the sensor is known. Then you can do full tomography and build up a 3D model as the sensor is run over the body. For extra points, have alignment sticker targets you can attach to the body to track the patient if they move. Veterinarians would go for that.
> For extra points, have alignment sticker targets you can attach to the body to track the patient if they move
This is roughly how surgical navigation systems work. The leaders in this area are companies like BrainLab and Medtronic, usually using optical tracking sensors (e.g. from Northern Digital), or sometimes electromagnetic, with accuracy in the 1-5mm range. For neurosurgery (the area I'm most familiar with), several companies offer tracked ultrasound integration, usually for live overlay and comparison with pre-operative MR or CT images.
> combine it with the positioning sensors of a VR system
For any folks interested in this, there is an active, excellent open source project called PLUS focused on ultrasound, tracking, and sensor data acquisition, as well as volume reconstruction [2]. There's also an associated 3d visualization ecosystem [3].
You can already get '3D' ultrasound, which is many individual images stitched together. Doesn't work if the baby moves around alot. Expensive and not covered by health insurance.
I don't think vet budgets are very large or favour high tech solutions but maybe you know otherwise.
I had a 3D ultrasound done at this place - http://www.firstviewultrasound.com - not long ago. I guess expensive means different things to different people, but I wound up with a CD full of a few dozen images and some movies for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100, which I thought it was a pretty good deal.
Typical consumer VR hardware isn't close to accurate enough for this. These sort of systems have been done though, as have 3D ultrasound via sweeping. Works quite well for some applications (e.g. Trans-esophageal)
If you have coarse positioning down to 1cm or so, and a bigger field of view than that with the ultrasound device, you can coarse align with the VR sensors and fine align by correlation. Somebody is probably doing it already.
I think this would be difficult for surface ultrasound as the surface (the patient) is deformable!
Varying degreees of pressure are used as part of the diagnostic process. For example, if you are trying to tell a vein from an artery, all things being equal, less force is required to compress a vein than an artery.
Typically ultrasound is used in an interactive way, not to generate static images for interpretation. This applies equally to diagnostics and procedural use.
