Stereoscopic Cardiac Ultrasound

In collaboration with Siemens Healthineers, I prototyped glasses-free, autostereoscopic visualization of volumetric cardiac ultrasound on the Sony Spatial Reality Display (SRD). The work was a student project in the scope of my Visual Computing master's at TU Wien, supervised by Dr.techn. Alexey Karimov.

3D cardiac ultrasound is clinically valuable, but viewing it on flat monitors still forces clinicians to mentally reconstruct anatomy. This prototype brings the volume into a stereoscopic “holographic” view with eye-tracked parallax, so depth is perceived directly. A core goal was supporting precise real-time distance and size measurements inside that stereoscopic environment—relevant for interventional planning.

The pipeline is Unity-based: MetaImage volumes are loaded into a 3D texture and rendered with a custom raymarching shader using Beer–Lambert accumulation and an interactive transfer function. Eye tracking from the SRD drives off-axis stereo projection. An interactive cutting plane exposes internal structures, and a shader-integrated GPU write-back path places 3D markers and computes Euclidean distances in object space—implemented via a custom unsafe Render Graph pass to work around Unity URP limitations.

Technical validation showed a stable real-time rendering and measurement pipeline. A planned comparative user study against 2D monitors could not be completed due to hardware sensor failure on the display, but qualitative development testing indicated clearer spatial perception than traditional screen-based views. Future directions include sterile hands-free interaction (e.g. foot pedals), gaze-driven focus, and richer geometric measurements for clinical adoption.