1. A component for use with a diagnostic medical ultrasound system comprising: an input source operative to provide a sequence of digital signals, each of said sequence of digital signals having been derived from at least one ultrasonic echo received by an ultrasound transducer from a subject in response to transmission of acoustic energy into said subject by said transducer; at least one processor coupled with said input source and comprising an incremental data processing architecture for executing a first application program, said first application program operative to incrementally receive and process each of at least a subset of said sequence of digital signals in succession; and an output sink coupled with said at least one processor and operative to receive said processed digital signals from said first application program.