Any ideas how to approach this and what kinds of tools (i.e. scripting elements, or whatever) I’d need to make an interactive where the person is taking the part of the health care professional doing an ultrasound of someone’s chest (looking at hearts, not babies, same concept though).
Honest to god, I think we’d have to make the ultrasound part a video, as I can’t even think of how one would be able to approximate what the ultrasound machine would actually see, based on 3D objects in a scene (and where the ultrasound emitter/receiver thing is).
But if it is possible, what would I need to know?
That’s not just as easy as it appears: I worked on it and yeah simulating the ultrasound-like images if fairly an established and well-know research. I think you can investigate the internet to see main works and algothms. I guess nowadays they uses shaders to simulate the look of US-images.
To visualize it have you considered libraries like VTK (Visualization ToolKits) check those out. Dunno if they could possible included as plug-in in Unity. If you are able to produce .DLL from the library well I guess you can. 
Awesome. Thanks for the fast response.
If you have the data, you could always plug it into a voxel engine for a pseudo-effect. What I did here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hssIjhsLCes .
Basic trick is:
- Find volume data of what you want to draw, e.g. heart.
- Render using voxels, assume something like .5 or higher = the surface.
- Change the camera near-clip plane.
It needed voxelform, and was pretty expensive poly wise, but could be somewhat reduced with average fidelity. Somewhat of a sledgehammer approach.
I’d take that approach, and maybe an overlay of the supposed ultrasound “arc” http://www.pregnancycheck.com/img/pregnancy-ultrasound-28-weeks.jpeg and take it from there?
Ha! No, no, there’s no voxel data. Or at least, I haven’t been given any and I doubt that the client would have it.
