Colour imaging is is a recent addition to plain 2-D real-time scanning.

Also known as "chroma" scans, user-selectable colour hues are assigned to the shades of grey for better visualization of subtle tissue details.

This clever enhancement is aimed at better interpretation of the scans. 'Colour scans' do not imply that various parts of the same picture are depicted in different colours like what we see in a colour photograph.