If you only want to visualise prerecorded ultrasound, DICOM or image sequence data, you can run Stradwin on any Linux or Windows PC with no additional setup required. We recommend you have a minimum of 2048 MBytes of RAM (memory) in order to be able to load average sized data sets. We usually install more than this, particularly when loading high resolution CT data. With some additional installation and the appropriate equipment, you can also use Stradwin to acquire 2D ultrasound data, acquire freehand 3D ultrasound data, or acquire 3D ultrasound data from a mechanical probe.
There are a variety of options for recording 2D ultrasound data using Stradwin. You need either:
For recording freehand 3D ultrasound data (i.e. a stream of 2D images along with their location and orientation), in addition to recording the images as above, you will also need a supported position sensor, either:
The optical sensors are the most accurate but also the most expensive. Also note that Stradwin requires either the optical or trakSTAR sensor to be able to track an ultrasound probe and a pointer simultaneously.
Many users of the Bird mount the receiver directly on the body of the ultrasound probe. Users of the Fastrak and Patriot generally use a rigid plastic mount to offset the receiver by about 10 cm from the probe.
If you are using an OptiTrack or Polaris position sensor, see the specific installation instructions for the OptiTrack or the Polaris.
For other systems, in order to record positions with the ultrasound data, connect your position sensor to one of the serial ports of the PC or, if your computer does not have old-style serial ports, to a USB port via a USB-serial converter.
Make sure that all users have permission to read and write to the appropriate serial device (/dev/ttyS0 or /dev/ttyS1 for old-style Linux serial ports, /dev/usb/ttyUSB0 or /dev/usb/ttyUSB1 for Linux USB-serial converters, COM1 or COM2 under Windows). Remember which serial port you have chosen, as you will need this information to configure Stradwin.
More information on setting up the position source can be found here.
Acquiring 3D ultrasound data from a mechanical probe
Download Stradwin Install.msi and run it on your system. This will install Stradwin on your computer.
Follow the further instructions above to install drivers for acquiring images or positions if that is required.
We provide a compressed tar file containing a 64-bit executable and several configuration files. Stradwin uses wxWidgets for its user interface, OpenGL for graphics and libv4l for video acquisition. Most of the necessary packages are installed by default on recent Linux distributions, though you might need to add some by hand (e.g. libwxgtk3.0).
The executable has been tested with Ubuntu 14.04. It might also work with other Linux distributions. If not, please contact us and we will do our best to provide you with an executable for your particular distribution.
Stradwin expects to find various configuration files in the same directory as the executable. These include the help data, any Polaris tool definition files, and RF probe configuration files. In Windows, you need to make sure that, if you are using a shortcut, the 'Start In' directory contains these configuration files. In Linux, you should specify the full path of the Stradwin executable when you run Stradwin (ie. do not rely on symbolic links, or your shell's search path). Otherwise Stradwin will still run, but will not be able to find the help data or configuration files.
Stradwin keeps certain information in a file called stradwin.ini, which is written out when the program finishes and read in when it starts up. By default, this file will be put in your home folder (sometimes called home directory). It will thus save information on a per-user basis. It is possible for you to specify explicitly the folder in which this file should be stored by giving the name of another folder on the command line as Stradwin is started up: stradwin dir=C:\myfolder
It is possible to start up Stradwin to view a particular file, or load a particular template file or script file, by specifying the name of the file on the command line. Any command line argument that does not begin with the letters 'dir=' will be interpreted as the name of a file that Stradwin will attempt to load.
If a group of people specify the same directory in which the stradwin.ini should be saved, then they will all share the same global values of attributes like the isocentre and pointer calibrations.
