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

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 visualizes 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.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.