UltraGauss: Ultrafast Gaussian Reconstruction of 3D Ultrasound Volumes

Mark Eid, Ana Namburete, Joao F. Henriques

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Ultrasound imaging is widely used due to its safety, affordability, and real-time capabilities, but its 2D interpretation is highly operator-dependent, leading to variability and increased cognitive demand. We present $\textbf{UltraGauss}$: an ultrasound-specific Gaussian Splatting framework that serves as an efficient approximation to acoustic image formation. Unlike projection-based splatting, UltraGauss renders by $\textit{probe-plane intersection}$ with in-plane aggregation, aligning with plane-based echo sampling while remaining fast and memory-efficient. A stable parameterisation and compute-aware GPU rasterisation make this method practical at scale. On clinical datasets, UltraGauss delivers state-of-the-art 2D-to-3D reconstructions in minutes on a single GPU (reaching 0.99 SSIM within $\sim$20 minutes), and a clinical expert survey rates its reconstructions the most realistic among competing methods. To our knowledge, this is the first Gaussian Splatting approach tailored to ultrasound 2D-to-3D reconstruction. Our code is available at: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/UltraGauss/