FUSION: a tool for registration and visualization of multiple modality 3D medical data
Mitchell Soltys, David Volk Beard, Vincent N. Carrasco, Suresh Kumar Mukherji, Julian G Rosenman · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1995
When forming a diagnosis or developing a treatment plan, physicians frequently rely on images from multiple modalities of acquisition. Each of the sets of images contain different information vital to a proper diagnosis or treatment. Typically physicians are required to spatially integrate information from different sources (such as CT, MR, and SPECT) in order to reconstruct an informationally complete 3D model of the patient. This spatial integration of multimodality information is an extremely complex cognitive task, and in the end there is no tangible model available to verify either the diagnosis or treatment plan. A system allowing the registration and visualization of multiple modality 3D data is a tool physicians can use to improve both the quality of and their confidence in diagnosis and treatment planning. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill we have developed a tool called FUSION to register and visualize multiple modality 3D data. Although our initial investigation began with, and still includes, automatic registration methods, we have found that an interactive method using 3D interactive visualizations is the most successful general approach for our registration needs. FUSION uses real-time volume and surface rendering techniques implemented on a SGI reality engine. With this tool, the user is provided with manipulation controls (to rotate, translate, and scale one or both data sets), contrast controls (to visualize various portions of each study's information), and visualization tools to see one or both of the studies with gray scale or various colors. These visualization methods include both static and dynamic display methods.