Paper Info
Title
METK - The Medical Exploration Toolkit
Abstract
In the following we will describe concept and realization of the Medical Exploration Toolkit - the METK. The METK is designed for loading, visualizing and exploring segmented medical data sets. It is a framework of several modules based on the free MeVisLab, a de- velopment environment for medical image processing and visualization. The framework is platform-independent and freely available. We will also present several different applications, developed with the METK. For many tasks in computer-aided medical visualization, it is not sufficient to display just one anatomical structure or to perform a simple volume render- ing. Building applications for complex case analysis with advanced visualization techniques is still an extensive job. Low level libraries like VTK (1) are very flex- ible, but the application development for supporting a special task is very time consuming. Julius (2) and VolV (3) are based on VTK and Qt and provide a faster application development. However, the programming environment is still C++, thus, substantial programming knowledge is still required. MeVisLab (4) provides an easy to learn, script based framework for medi- cal image processing and visualization, based on modular visual programming. Among other libraries, VTK and Qt are also integrated. Thus, a full image processing and visualization pipeline can be used for application development without deep programming knowledge. Currently, there is no general communication or data standard available in public with MeVisLab. Hence, newly designed visualization or exploration tech- niques need to be adapted for each application. Also simple tasks such as loading specific patient image data or the visualization of segmented structures require a deep knowledge of the used techniques. The Application Frame (AppFrame) facilitates the integration and testing of new algorithms and the development of application prototypes with MeVisLab that can be used in clinical envi- ronments (5). While AppFrame indeed addresses generic issues such as DICOM image import and export, user-management, reporting, and documentation func- tionality, it does not provide advanced visualization and exploration techniques. In addition, the AppFrame is not available in public.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1007/978-3-540-78640-5_82
Bildverarbeitung für die Medizin
Keywords
Field
DocType
application development,volume rendering,visual programming
Data set,Parallel rendering,Computer graphics (images),Visualization,Computer science,Development environment,Visual analytics,Image processing
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.42
7
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christian Tietjen121118.39
Konrad Mühler2236.05
Felix Ritter392.81
Olaf Konrad4897.19
Milo Hindennach51229.50
Bernhard Preim61766235.86