GPU-BASED IMAGE MANIPULATION AND ENHANCEMENT TECHNIQUES FOR DYNAMIC VOLUMETRIC MEDICAL IMAGE VISUALIZATION

An important part of an image-guided surgical system is the display component, and seamless interactivity is critical to its successful application in a clinical environment. In this paper, we present several novel techniques for 4D medical image manipulation and enhancement that employ a graphics processing unit (GPU) to accelerate image processing. We describe three types of voxel color and opacity classification algorithms, and two volume clipping techniques, providing alias-free image quality and improved rendering speed. In addition, we applied a pre-integrated volume shading algorithm to enable less graphics memory consumption and computational cost than traditional shading methods, and a new technique is proposed to improve the quality of the image at the clipping plane in the shaded volume. All of these algorithms have been embedded into our 4D cardiac visualization software framework to provide physicians with real-time visualization and manipulation of volume-rendered medical images