© 1990 SPIE. All rights reserved. A real time volumetric ultrasound imaging system has been developed for medical diagnosis. The scanner produces images analogous to an optical camera or the human eye and supplies more information than conventional sonograms. Potential medical applications include improved anatomic visualization, tumour localization and better assessment of cardiac function. The system uses pulse-echo phased array principles to steer a two-dimensional array transducer of 289 elements in a pyramidal scan format. Parallel processing in the receive mode produces 4992 scan lines at a rate of approximately 8 frames/second. Echo data for the scanned volume is presented as projection images with depth perspective, stereoscopic pairs, multiple tomographic images, or C scans.