High-performance medical visualization tools to aid in kidney assessment
Ning Tang, Timothy S. Newman · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1997
This paper describes a suite of high performance medical visualization tools implemented using a networked computing configuration. The tools are designed to supply interactive and near-real-time visualization capability for volumetric data to assist in diagnosis, monitoring, and surgical planning for kidney disorders, especially the Von Hippel Lindau Syndrome. The networked configuration combines the computing power of a vector-parallel supercomputer with the interactive graphics capability of a high-end workstation. In this paper, our focus is on the image rendering and interactive data exploration functional units of the system. One computationally intensive feature extraction and image rendering function - including the marching cubes, volume ray casting, and surface ray tracing - have been vectorized and are discussed. We also present interactive exploration tools for viewing arbitrary orthogonal sets of planes and a probing tool for 3D measurements. These latter tools were implemented on the workstation.