GRCVS: A GPU-based and real-time cardiac visualization system

Visualization is very useful for the study of the heart, but it is still a challenging work to display the detailed heart because of the complex structure and expensive computation. Very few systems have been developed to satisfy this work specially. In this paper, we designed and implemented a GPU-based and real-time cardiac visualization system (GRCVS). The illumination model and the context-preserving model are integrated into the system, so that it can generate better images and preserve the important boundary information at the same time. The rendering process is programmed with CUDA, which helps to view the final image in real time. The system also provides strong interactive ability: it supplies visual and concise interfaces to set various parameters which are used to adjust image effect and user can also use simple ways to observe the images quickly and conveniently. The system has been proved to be valuable for the study of the heart in biomedical field.