Three-dimensional visualization of medical images over the internet
Sunghyun Kim, Samuel Moon-Ho Song · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2003
Three-dimensional visualization of medical images based on X-CT 2-D slice images requires a specialized medical imaging workstation and a trained operator to effectively generate 3-D images of the human anatomy. We therefore propose a system so that remote users can visualize and manipulate 3-D medical images without any specialized equipment nor all the slice data. The 3-D data set is pre-rendered at appropriately designed multiple viewpoints. The resulting images are compressed using the moving picture experts group (MPEG) standard and stored. The remote user can easily access the 3-D data for browsing and manipulation over the Internet using our newly developed 3-D viewer. The key features of our system are as follows: (1) the viewpoints for pre-rendering are spaced apart isotropically on the surface of the sphere, (2) the quantization level is determined at encode time to keep the PSNR of all images constant, (3) the encoder is designed to improve compression efficiency exploiting the similarity between adjacent viewpoint images and (4) the compressed 3-D dataset is streamed over the network so that the user can view the received data while the rest is being streamed.