Interactive Volume Rendering Module using Two-Dimensional Transfer Function on Cone-Beam Computed Tomography Data

Abstract

The transfer function’s design has a direct impact on the outcome of the medical image visualization. A well-designed transfer function can boost both image quality as well as visualization speed. In this paper, a new approach is proposed for developing an interactive ubiquitous volume rendering module using a 2D histogram-based transfer function on medical data. The set of direct manipulation widgets in VTK is used to demonstrate interactive and intuitive 2D transfer functions. Also, the interaction in the histogram was done by adding multiple control points, which act as the boundary-emphasizing function designed to identify regions of the transfer function. The CBCT dataset of the dentofacial images is used to evaluate the outcome of the proposed 2D transfer function by highlighting the required features in the dentofacial volume. By comparing with the 3D Slicer open-source software, the effectiveness and quality were much more accurate, and more detailed clear information can be visualized from the proposed approach.