웹 기반 3차원 의료모델 시각화 시스템

Web based 3-D Medical Image Visualization System on the PC

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 software's accessibility. In this paper, the development of world-wide-web based medical consultation system or radiology imaging is addressed to provide the platform independence and great accessibility. The system supports sharing of 3-dimensional objects. We use VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), which is the de-facto 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 set 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-sized, and 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://netopia.snu.ac.kr/-cyber/). and several sessions of experiments are carried out.