Design of an interactive 3D medical visualization system

Recent advances in computer technologies in terms of both hardware and software have already made the development of an interactive 3D medical visualization system viable. Volume rendering as an important visualization technique can truly represent the information within the 3D datasets. However, it lacks of desirable interactivity. In order to deal with this problem, we introduce an interactive framework which is capable of the medical image visualization based on high-quality volume rendering. The framework implements various interactive functions with volume rendering techniques, such as displaying arbitrary cross sections and picking objects in 3D space. The system is evaluated by 4 continuous clinical patient data from Computed Tomography Angiograph (CTA) scans, and its performance is estimated by sophisticated surgeons.