Interactive Segmentation and Visualization using Level-Set Method based on Graphics Hardware

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient graphics hardware- based method to segment and visualize level-set surfaces as interactive rates. Our method is composed of CPU page manager, GPU level set solver, and GPU volume renderer. The CPU page manager generates page table, inverse page table and available page stack as well as process the activation and inactivation of pages. Our GPU level set solver computes only voxels near the iso-surface. To run efficiently on GPUs, volume is decomposed into a set of small pages. Only those pages with non-zero derivatives are stored on GPU. These active pages are packed into a large 2D texture. The 3D level set partial differential equation (PDE) is computed directly on this packed format. The CPU page manager is used to help manage the packing of the active data. Our GPU volume renderer performs volume rendering of the original data simultaneously with the evolving level set. Our efficient GPU-based method relies on packing the level set surface data into a dynamic, sparse texture format. As the level set moves, this sparse data structure is updated via a novel GPU to CPU message passing scheme. Our method is applied to two chest CT datasets for evaluating computation time. Experimental results show that our solution is much faster than previous optimized solutions based on software technique.