2010 NAMIC Project week: Volume Rendering for Virtual Colonoscopy

Key Investigators

• MGH: Yin Wu
• MGH: Hiro Yoshida

• Isomics, Inc: Steve Pieper
• BWH: Ron Kikinis

Objective

Pursure volume rendering that is suitable for real-time and interactive virtual colonoscopy display.

The objectives of this project is to:

• Examine internal volume rendering engines (open source) availabel in Slicer
• Provide external volume rendering engines (closed source) for virtual colonoscopy
• Compare the performance of these volume rendering engines.
• Compare the advantages and disadvantages of these volume rendering engines in real-time high-quality virtual colonoscopy navigation

Approach, Plan

Several virtual colonoscopy datasets will be rendered by use of the below volume rendering engines.

• VTK GPU Raycasting in Slicer 3.6 (GLSL)
• Microsoft research (MSR) volume rendering (CUDA, closed source)

The performance of these volume rendering engines will be compared based on various metrics.

Progress

The two volume rendering engines are installed on a single computer equipped with a CUDA-based GPU for rendering the virtual colonoscopy datasets and for performance comparison purposes.

Delivery Mechanism

A table that shows a comparison of the above two rendering engines in terms of

• rendering performance and
• advantages and disadvantages in rendering virtual colonoscopy datasets in clinical settings

will be delivered.

References