Performing high quality 3D visualizations on mobile devices, while tantalizingly close in many areas, is still a quite difficult task. This is especially true for 3D volume rendering of digital medical images. Allowing this would empower medical personnel a powerful tool to diagnose and treat patients and train the next generation of physicians. This research focuses on performing real time volume rendering of digital medical images on iOS devices using custom developed GPU shaders for orthogonal texture slicing. An interactive volume renderer was designed and developed with several new features including dynamic modification of render resolutions, an incremental render loop, a shader-based clipping algorithm to support OpenGL ES 2.0, and an internal backface culling algorithm for properly sorting rendered geometry with alpha blending. The application was developed using several application programming interfaces (APIs) such as OpenSceneGraph (OSG) as the primary graphics renderer coupled with iOS Cocoa Touch for user interaction, and DCMTK for DICOM I/O. The developed application rendered volume datasets over 450 slices up to 50-60 frames per second, depending on the specific model of the iOS device. All rendering is done locally on the device so no Internet connection is required.

Date Published: 7 March 2013
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 8667, Multimedia Content and Mobile Devices, 86670U (7 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2005335

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8667:
Multimedia Content and Mobile Devices
Reiner Creutzburg; Todor G. Georgiev; Dietmar Wüller; Cees G. M. Snoek; Kevin J. Matherson; David Akopian; Andrew Lumsdaine; Lyndon S. Kennedy, Editor(s)