Real-time display and manipulation of 3-D CT, PET, and NMR data

A fully interactive physician's workstation which supports the display and manipulation of 3-D medical datasets has been constructed. Based on the ''Voxel Processor'' architecture, the system uses special-purpose computer hardware to provide a variety of display modalities including shaded surface display, multi-planar reconstruction, and 3-D display of dynamically changing objects - all with real-time update rates (15 frames/second). Grey-scale voxel densities are retained throughout the processing so that windowing and thresholding can be accomplished interactively in true real-time. Other real-time features include rotation, scaling, and slice plane control. This paper describes the 3-D physician's workstation and summarizes the major requirements for future 3-D workstations as they relate to specific medical applications. The general architecture and functional characteristics of advanced 3-D display processors supporting these requirements are presented