Speaker: Soeren Grimm (Germany)
Today's real-world medical visualization systems for medical data are much more than just the visualization. Such systems have a back-end that stores the medical data and reports, and a front-end that assists the user in analyze and exam the data. The front-end has means to manual-segment, auto-segment, carve, measure, annotate, etc, and to view the data in 2D or 3D. The visualization is a small, but a very crucial, part of such a system. Since it is the visual feedback the user gets after he performed any operation and therefore it has to be interactive and in high quality. The 3D view is basically volume rendering and needs enormous computational power and memory bandwidth to get high quality and interactivity. There are several ways to do volume rendering, however it is still not clear what is the best way to do it in a real-world visualization system. This talk presents four different ways of volume rendering - based on SIMD, VolumePro, Texture mapping, and finally pure CPU -, their underlying volume memory layouts, and their usability in real-world visualization systems.
Keywords: Volume rendering, Ray casting, Texture Mapping, Multithreading, Hyperthreading, OpenGL, VolumePro, Parallel processing.