Faster, higher quality volume visualization for 3D medical imaging
Alan D. Kalvin, Andrew F. Laine, Ting Lu Song · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
The two major volume visualization methods used in biomedical applications are Maximum Intensity Projection (MIP) and Volume Rendering (VR), both of which involve the process of creating sets of 2D projections from 3D images. We have developed a new method for very fast, high-quality volume visualization of 3D biomedical images, based on the fact that the inverse of this process (transforming 2D projections into a 3D image) is essentially equivalent to tomographic image reconstruction. This new method uses the 2D projections acquired by the scanner, thereby obviating the need for the two computationally expensive steps currently required in the complete process of biomedical visualization, that is, (i) reconstructing the 3D image from 2D projection data, and (ii) computing the set of 2D projections from the reconstructed 3D image As well as improvements in computation speed, this method also results in improvements in visualization quality, and in the case of x-ray CT we can exploit this quality improvement to reduce radiation dosage. In this paper, demonstrate the benefits of developing biomedical visualization techniques by directly processing the sensor data acquired by body scanners, rather than by processing the image data reconstructed from the sensor data. We show results of using this approach for volume visualization for tomographic modalities, like x-ray CT, and as well as for MRI.