title: Web based 3-D medical image visualization on the PC.
abstract: With the recent advance of Web and its associated technologies, information sharing on distribute computing environments has gained a great amount of attention from many researchers in many application areas, such as medicine, engineering, and business. One basic requirement of distributed medical consultation systems is that geographically dispersed, disparate participants are allowed to exchange information readily with each other. Such software also needs to be supported on a broad range of computer platforms to increase the softwares accessibility. In this paper, the development of world-wide-web based medical consultation system for radiology imaging is addressed to provide platform independence and greater accessibility. The system supports sharing of 3-dimensional objects. We use VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), which is the defacto standard in 3-D modeling on the Web. 3-D objects are reconstructed from CT or MRI volume data using a VRML format, which can be viewed and manipulated easily in Web-browsers with a VRML plug-in. A Marching cubes method is used in the transformation of scanned volume data sets to polygonal surfaces of VRML. A decimation algorithm is adopted to reduce the number of meshes in the resulting VRML file. 3-D volume data are often very large in size, hence loading the data on PC level computers requires a significant reduction of the size of the data, while minimizing the loss of the original shape information. This is also important to decrease network delays. A prototype system has been implemented (http://cybernet5.snu.ac.kr/-cyber/mrivrml .html), and several sessions of experiments are carried out.
authors.affiliation: BIT Co., Ltd. Technical Institute, Korea.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: D H
authors.initials: DH
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: J H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: H J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Cho
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D019412:Anatomy, Cross-Sectional; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D020407:Internet; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008838:Microcomputers; D011381:Programming Languages; D019114:Remote Consultation; D012984:Software; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed