Summary
Objective
: Volume segmentation with concurrent visualization is becoming an increasingly important
part of medical diagnostics. This is due to the fact that the immediate visual feedback
speeds up evaluation of the segmentation process, hence enhances segmentation quality.
Therefore, our aim was to develop a method for volume segmentation and smoothing which
achieves interactive performance on standard PCs and is useful in clinical practice
(i.e. fast and of high quality).
Methods
: Our application is based on seeded region growing and nonlinear isotropic as well
as anisotropic diffusion. We use current GPUs (graphics processing units) to speed
up the computation of the diffusion process and use hardware-accelerated interactive
volume rendering.
Results
: Using our approach the user can observe the diffusion process in real-time, change
parameters interactively and view the result in a high-quality 3D direct volume rendering
(DVR).
Conclusion
: The interactive nature of our algorithm and simultaneous visualization improved
the usability of our segmentation and smoothing algorithm and proved useful in the
clinical workflow. Using our application we were able to speed up the (an)isotropic
diffusion process to achieve interactive performance.
Keywords
Volume segmentation - volume smoothing - GPU - diffusion - direct volume rendering
