Interactive dual-volume rendering visualization with real-time fusion and transfer function enhancement

Abstract

Dual-modality imaging scanners combining functional PET and anatomical CT constitute a challenge in volumetric visualization that can be limited by the high computational demand and expense. This study aims at providing physicians with multi-dimensional visualization tools, in order to navigate and manipulate the data running on a consumer PC. We have maximized the utilization of pixel-shader architecture of the low-cost graphic hardware and the texture-based volume rendering to provide visualization tools with high degree of interactivity. All the software was developed using OpenGL and Silicon Graphics Inc. Volumizer, tested on a Pentium mobile CPU on a PC notebook with 64M graphic memory. We render the individual modalities separately, and performing real-time per-voxel fusion. We designed a novel "alpha-spike" transfer function to interactively identify structure of interest from volume rendering of PET/CT. This works by assigning a non-linear opacity to the voxels, thus, allowing the physician to selectively eliminate or reveal information from the PET/CT volumes. As the PET and CT are rendered independently, manipulations can be applied to individual volumes, for instance, the application of transfer function to CT to reveal the lung boundary while adjusting the fusion ration between the CT and PET to enhance the contrast of a tumour region, with the resultant manipulated data sets fused together in real-time as the adjustments are made. In addition to conventional navigation and manipulation tools, such as scaling, LUT, volume slicing, and others, our strategy permits efficient visualization of PET/CT volume rendering which can potentially aid in interpretation and diagnosis.