Title
A Clustering Based Transfer Function For Volume Rendering Using Gray-Gradient Mode Histogram
Abstract
Volume rendering is an emerging technique widely used in the medical field to visualize human organs using tomography image slices. In volume rendering, sliced medical images are transformed into attributes, such as color and opacity through transfer function. Thus, the design of the transfer function directly affects the result of medical images visualization. A well-designed transfer function can improve both the image quality and visualization speed. In one of our previous paper, we designed a multi-dimensional transfer function based on region growth to determine the transparency of a voxel, where both gray threshold and gray change threshold are used to calculate the transparency. In this paper, a new approach of the transfer function is proposed based on clustering analysis of gray-gradient mode histogram, where volume data is represented in a two-dimensional histogram. Clustering analysis is carried out based on the spatial information of volume data in the histogram, and the transfer function is automatically generated by means of clustering analysis of the spatial information. The dataset of human thoracic is used in our experiment to evaluate the performance of volume rendering using the proposed transfer function. By comparing with the original transfer function implemented in two popularly used volume rendering systems, visualization toolkit (VTK) and RadiAnt DICOM Viewer, the effectiveness and performance of the proposed transfer function are demonstrated in terms of the rendering efficiency and image quality, where more accurate and clearer features are presented rather than a blur red area. Furthermore, the complex operations on the two-dimensional histogram are avoided in our proposed approach and more detailed information can be seen from our final visualized image.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2923080
IEEE ACCESS
Keywords
Field
DocType
Gray-gradient mode histogram, clustering analysis, transfer function, volume rendering
Histogram,Volume rendering,Pattern recognition,Computer science,Transfer function,Artificial intelligence,Cluster analysis,Distributed computing
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
7
2169-3536
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
13
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yisha Lan131.71
Yimin Ding200.34
xin luo393.45
Yanzhao Zhang400.34
Chenxi Huang560.82
E. Y. K. Ng638440.34
Weihong Huang732.06
Xuezhong Zhou820930.20
Jie Su900.68
Yonghong Peng1040033.39
Zhicheng Wang1117617.00
Yongqiang Cheng1213329.99
Wenliang Che1342.38