6/21/2005VG 2005 Volume Graphics: What's in the cards... Michael Meissner (Viatronix)

6/21/2005VG 2005 Volume Graphics: What's in the cards... Michael Meissner (Viatronix)

6/21/2005VG (10?) key questions from 1999  What’s in the cards?  In which cards???  Well, it really depends on the perspective  In the following: medical applications

6/21/2005VG 2005 Medical Applications Where do physicians use VG?  Diagnostic tool (Unable to automatically tell what’s wrong, 3D is ordered in < 5% of all cases because it is time consuming and difficult)  Treatment planning tool (what to do?).  Verification tool (automatic detection)  Interdisciplinary communication tool

6/21/2005VG 2005 Medical Applications Observations:  Scientists: explorative visualization (understand problem and find solution)  End-users: 1, 2, or 3 clicks to get to the goal (simplicity!!!) (make solution available, robust, reproducible)  Strong NEED for automation, consisting of:  Segmentation  Detection  Guidance  Visualization (1D, 2D, 3D, 4D?)  only fraction of the problem  Etc.  Where is this (VG) research and what of it is engineering?

6/21/2005VG (10?) key questions from 1999 On the initial questions:  Volumes vs. surfaces? Rectilinear, curved, irregular, etc.  Definition of reflection, refraction, etc.? (amorphous)  Concepts to unify modelling & rendering  API  Voxel-based radiosity? Feasible? Advantages?  Force & touch with volume data? (Deformation?)  Volume based digitisation?  Frequency domain representations fast enough?  Availability of real-time volume rendering?  Impact of VG onto other fields?

6/21/2005VG (10?) key questions from 1999 Availability of real-time volume rendering?  CPU, GPU, and dedicated hardware able to deal with voxels (up to 512 3? )  This will continue to improve but:  CPUs already slow down  GPUs will slow down, too  Parallel rendering: unavoidable!!!  Multiple CPU cores  Intel, AMD, IBM (Cell)  Will it be SIMD or MIMD?  In the future, where is difference of CPU/GPU? Feasability

6/21/2005VG (10?) key questions from 1999 Availability of real-time volume rendering?  APIs limited:  High-level: Volumizer, TGS Inventor  Low-level: OpenGL, DirectX  Related libraries limited:  Vtk, Itk, ?

6/21/2005VG (10?) key questions from 1999 What would it take to make it verifiable?  Reference:  Datasets  but also what to look for!!! (app domain)  Transfer functions  View ports  Renderings  Etc.  Framework to build on top/plug into needed!!! (but where should it come from? Who should be gate keeper?)  Research community might not capable of this?

6/21/2005VG (10?) key questions from 1999 Impact of VG onto other fields?  Who is impacting who? Apps <> VG  Is VG is (becoming) application specific  VG has become integral part in medicine but only for a fraction of cases because there are simple alternative solutions.  A (classical) volume rendered image is not necessarily most meaningful. Simplicity!!!

6/21/2005VG 2005 Impact of VG: radiology Asking radiologists about the most important innovations of the last decade:  MIP  Thin slab  …  3D Primary reason: too many slices to review

6/21/2005VG 2005 Future What is in the cards:  Larger data: 16 bit datasets (64 bit OS)  Multi-resolution volume rendering  Memory management  Parallelism  Multi-modality scans:  Fusion  Registration  Non Photo-realistic rendering!!!  Segmentation  User interfaces

6/21/2005VG 2005  If we accomplish to work with the application domain then we might get:

6/21/2005VG (10?) key questions from 1999 What is going on in medical applications? Previously: dedicated high-end workstations Hot (current) trend is client/server:  Expensive high-end VG  server based  (Thin) client machines already available (& cheap)  Network is an issue, WWW is a problem  Deployment solely dependent on networks