Patent ID: 7775977

Claim:
An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus moving an ultrasonic transducer within a body cavity of a body to be examined and creating plural chronological tomographic images in accordance with the movement, the apparatus comprising: position information detecting means for detecting position information of the ultrasonic transducer when the tomographic images are obtained; means for creating an auxiliary image indicating position information of the tomographic images along a non-linear path of the movement of the ultrasonic transducer based on position information obtained by the position information detecting means and the tomographic images corresponding to the position information; and display control means for displaying the auxiliary image and a tomographic image corresponding to the auxiliary image so as to compare them; recording means for recording the tomographic images and the position information in association with each other; input means for selecting and indicating one tomographic image to be displayed together with the auxiliary image from among the plural tomographic images recorded in the recording means, wherein the auxiliary image creating means creates, during radial scanning by the ultrasonic transducer, the auxiliary image including a plurality of two-dimensional anisotropic ultrasonic image markers arranged along the movement path of the ultrasonic transducer, each of the markers expressing a position and orientation in three dimensional space of a scan plane of the ultrasonic transducer when the tomographic image is obtained, wherein the auxiliary image creating means further makes a display form of the ultrasonic image marker corresponding to the tomographic image displayed for comparison among the plural ultrasonic image markers different from a display form of the other ultrasonic image markers, and wherein the auxiliary image creating means again creates an auxiliary image such that the ultrasonic image marker at a position where the one tomographic image was obtained and the ultrasonic image markers other than the ultrasonic image marker at the position where the one tomographic image was obtained are displayed in different display forms, in conjunction with the selecting of the one tomographic image by the input means after the radial scanning by the ultrasonic transducer.