InViVo - visualize of medical data
Abstract
The two most frequently used presentation techniques for rendering volume data focus either on the reconstruction of the appearance of surfaces, used usually with medical data like CT or MRI, or on the visualization as semitransparent gels. Surface reconstruction methods frequently provide poor results when used with data that do not provide something like a well-defined surface, having "fuzzy" hot-spots, possibly overlayed by significant noise signals (e.g., geological, atmospherical, meteorological and environmental data; presure, temperature or density distributions; data from non-destructive material testing, medical imaging of soft tissues, etc.). In addition, commonly employed raytracing techniques are not interactive because they require several minutes for each frame, even on powerful workstations. The InViVo system is based on the absorption and scattering of light within participating media, runs on usual modern workstations (single- or multi-processor), Produces a "cloudy" v isualization of scalar, discrete volume data, and allows interactive, or even real-time, processing of large data bases. Interactivity is not restricted to geometric transformations, but it includes all possible modes of processing the data (thresholding, filtering, clipping, biasing, coloring, etc.). Therefore the InViVo approach finds significant applications in all application fields mentioned above.