Abstract
Because of the complex and fine structure, visualization of the heart still remains a challenging task, which makes it an active research topic. In this paper, we present a visualization system for medical data, which takes advantage of the recent graphics processing unit (GPU) and can provide real-time cardiac visualization. This work focuses on investigating the anatomical structure visualization of the human heart, which is fundamental to the cardiac visualization, medical training and diagnosis assistance. Several state-of-the-art cardiac visualization methods are integrated into the proposed system and a task specified visualization method is proposed. In addition, auxiliary tools are provided to generate user specified visualization results. The contributions of our work lie in two-fold: for doctors and medical staff, the system can provide task specified visualization with interactive visualization tools; for researchers, the proposed platform can serve as a baseline for comparing different rendering methods and can easily incorporate new rendering methods. Experimental results show that the proposed system can provide favorable cardiac visualization results in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.
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Notes
We have uploaded the source codes of the proposed system to https://sourceforge.net/projects/cardiacvis/.
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Acknowledgments
The work is partially supported by the Youth Foundation of Harbin University under Grants No. HUYF2013-025, the Higher Education and Teaching Reform project under Grants No. JG2014011155 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grants No. 61173086 and No. 61502275. This work was also supported in part by Scientific Research Found of Shandong University (No. 1050513200007), Art and Science Planning Project of Heilongjiang Province (No. 2014A015) and the innovation found of Harbin (No. 2013RFQXJ110). The authors thank anonymous reviewers and the Editor-in-Chief for their helpful comments and suggestions. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Mr. James Kollmer for proofreading this paper.
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Zhang, L., Wang, K., Yang, F. et al. A Visualization System for Interactive Exploration of the Cardiac Anatomy. J Med Syst 40, 135 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-016-0480-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-016-0480-y