Volume Rendering

Introduction

As part of a joint initiative with Dr. Rudy Lapeer from the School of Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia, we developed a PC-based volume rendering application, called 3DView.

This application takes advantage of the high power of today's consumer graphics cards to render volumetric data, for example from CT or MRI scans. The software can use 2D or 3D texturing, according to the capability of the graphics card, which is detected at run time.

On this web site, we are currently offering a free download of this application, partly to publicise our research and partly to attract feedback. 3DView is used as the basis for our research in Augmented Reality.

This page summarises the features available in 3DView and illustrates these with a number of screenshots. If you have any comments or questions about this application or any other area of the web site, please contact us via e-mail and we will do our best to respond quickly.

3DView Basic features

The 3DView application runs on a Windows platform and was developed using Microsoft Visual C++ and MFC. For import of DICOM data, we use a VC7 port of the OFFIS DCMTK Toolkit. 3DView is designed to work on a standard desktop or laptop computer using an off-the-shelf graphics adapter. The power available from today's high-performance graphics cards is such that the features previously supplied by high-cost graphics workstations can now be provided at much lower cost. This improvement in price/performance is driven by the computer games market, which is still expanding. 3DView uses the OpenGL API for rendering.

Although 3DView will run on most modern hardware, it is optimised for higher-specification graphics cards (NVidia GeForce 3 and above, or ATI Radeon 9000 and above). Some features, which are more developed in our current research, are rudimentary in 3DView. The features include:

• Alpha blended display of volumetric data using 2D or 3D textures
• Maximum Intensity Projection (MIP)
• Multi-Planar Reformatting (MPR)
• Up to six fixed-orientation moveable cut planes
• Interactive fly-through
• Stereoscopic display using anaglyph or dual viewport methods
• Interactive transfer function modification
• Iso-surface mesh generation
• 3D Watershed segmentation
• Raw data and DICOM data import options