Region of interest and multiresolution for volume rendering Sébastien Piccand, Rita Noumeir, and Eric Paquette, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 12(5), pages 561-568, 2008.

Abstract

Medical image interpretation is facing an important challenge resulting from the continuously increasing amount of imaging data. Innovations in medical image visualization are necessary to assist the radiologist in interacting and navigating effectively large multi-dimensional imaging sets.

We propose a novel wavelet splatting approach for multiresolution 3D visualization. Our method renders the context with a low resolution at first, and then subsequently refines it progressively to attain full resolution, while ensuring that a specific region of interest is rendered at full resolution at all times. It is based on the splatting approach for its computational efficiency and uses the localization property of the wavelet transform to simultaneously render a full resolution region of interest with a coarser context. Lighting calculations are used in the preprocessing stage to enhance the quality of the visualization. A special data structure that is based on a zero-tree model is used to manipulate the region of interest more easily. The speed-up achieved reaches a factor of 30 compared to the time needed to display the full resolution data. By achieving effective 3D rendering, we bring an element of solution to the problem of the image overload.

Keywords

3D visualization, large data sets, medical imaging, multiresolution, navigation, region of interest, volume rendering, wavelet splatting.

BibTeX entry

@Article{Piccand:2007:EVV,
  author =       "S\'{e}bastien Piccand and Rita Noumeir and Eric Paquette",
  title =        "Region of interest and multiresolution for volume rendering",
  booktitle =    "SPIE Medical Imaging",
  year =         "2007",
  journal =      "IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine",
  pages =        "561--568",
  volume =       12,
  number =       5,
  year =         "2008",
}

Online version

Adobe PDF version of the paper, 0.4Mb.