Volume rendering applications are used in medical imaging in order to facilitate the analysis of three-dimensional image data. This study focuses on how to improve the usability of graphical user interfaces of these systems, by gathering user requirements. This is achieved by evaluations of existing systems, together with interviews and observations at clinics in Sweden that use volume rendering to some extent. The usability of the applications of today is not sufficient, according to the users participating in this study. This is due to a wide range of reasons. One reason is that the graphical user interface is not intuitive. Another reason is that the users do not rely on the technique to produce sufficient results that can be used in the diagnostic process. The issue of user confidence is mainly due to the problem of the generation and user control of the transfer functions used in volume rendering. Based on the results of the evaluation a graphical user interface, including the most important and frequently used functions, is designed. A suggestion for how the transfer function can be generated is presented.

Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) is used to obtain images showing the vascular system. To detect stenosis, which is narrowing of for example blood vessels, maximum intensity projection (MIP) is typically used. This technique often fails to demonstrate the stenosis if the projection angle is not suitably chosen. To improve identification of this region a color-coding algorithm could be helpful. The color should be carefully chosen depending on the vessel diameter. In this thesis a segmentation to produce a binary 3d-volume is made, followed by a distance transform to approximate the Euclidean distance from the centerline of the vessel to the background. The distance is used to calculate the smallest diameter of the vessel and that value is mapped to a color. This way the color information regarding the diameter would be the same from all the projection angles. Color-coded MIPs, where the color represents the maximum distance, are also implemented. The MIP will result in images with contradictory information depending on the angle choice. Looking in one angle you would see the actual stenosis and looking in another you would see a color representing the abnormal diameter.

To efficiently examine volumetric data sets from CT or MRI scans good volume rendering applications are needed. This thesis describes the design and implementation of an application programming interface (API) to be used when developing volume-rendering applications. A complete application programming interface has been designed. The interface is designed so that it makes writing application programs containing volume rendering fast and easy. The interface also makes created application programs hardware independent. Volume rendering using 3d-textures is implemented on Windows and Unix platforms. Rendering performance has been compared between different graphics hardware.

Illustrative visualization is a term for visualization techniques inspired by traditional technical and medical illustration. These techniques are based on knowledge of the human perception and provide effective visual abstraction to make the visualizations more understandable. Within volume rendering these expressive visualizations can be achieved using non-photorealistic rendering that combines different levels of abstraction to convey the most important information to the viewer. In this thesis I will look at illustrative techniques and show how these can be used to visualize anatomical structures in a medical volume data. The result of the thesis is a prototype of an anatomy education application, that makes use of illustrative techniques to have a focus+context visualization with feature enhancement, tone shading and labels describing the anatomical structures. This results in an expressive visualization and interactive exploration of the human anatomy.

Este trabalho apresenta uma nova técnica de visualização que aproveita as vantagens do rendering volumétrico direto e do rendering de superfícies em um ambiente híbrido. O método faz uso de uma pré-visualização sobre o bordo do volume que viabiliza uma interação em tempo real com objetos volumétricos modelados por meio de malhas não estruturadas. Além disso, essa nova abordagem de visualização é paralelizável e pode se acelerada com placas gráficas comuns. / This work presents a new visualization technique that exploits the advantages of direct volume rendering and surface rendering in a hybrid environment. The method developed here makes use of a pre-visualization on the volume boundary to enable real time interaction with unstructured volumetric meshes. Furthermore, this new visualization approach can be implemented on existing parallel architectures and speed up by conventional graphical hardware.

[pt] Técnicas de visualização científica criam imagens na tentativa de revelar estruturas e fenômenos complexos. Técnicas ilustrativas têm sido incorporadas aos sistemas de visualizacão científica para melhorar a expressividade de tais imagens. A visualização de linhas caracteríticas é uma técnica importante para transmitir uma melhor informacão sobre a forma das superfícies. Neste trabalho, propomos combinar visualização volumétrica de malhas não estruturadas com isosuperfícies ilustradas. Isto é feito estendendo um algoritmo de traçado de raio em GPU para incorporar ilustração com linhas de variação extrema da iluminação(photic extremum lines), um tipo de linha característica que captura mudanças bruscas de luminância, revelando formas de um jeito perceptualmente correto. / [en] Scientic visualization techniques create images attempting to reveal complex structures and phenomena. Illustrative techniques have been incorporated to scientic visualization systems in order to improve the expressiveness of such images. The rendering of feature lines is an important technique for better depicting surface shapes and features. In this thesis, we propose to combine volume visualization of unstructured meshes with illustrative isosurfaces. This is accomplished by extending a GPU-based ray-casting algorithm to incorporate illustration with photic extremum lines, a type of feature lines able to capture sudden changes of luminance, conveying shapes in a perceptually correct way.

<div>Volumetric cloud generation and rendering algorithms are well-developed to meet the need for a realistic sky performance in animation or games. However, it is challenging to create a stylized or designed animation for volumetric clouds using physics-based generation and simulation methods in real-time.</div><div>The problem raised by the research is the current volumetric cloud animation controlling methods are not art-directable. Making a piece of volumetric cloud move in a specific way can be difficult when using only a physics-based simulation method. The purpose of the study is to implement an animating method for volumetric clouds and with art-directable controllers. Using this method, a designer can easily control the cloud's motion in a reliable way. The program will achieve interactive performance using parallel processing with CUDA. Users will be able to animate the cloud by input a few vectors inside the cloud volume. </div><div>After reviewing the literature related to the real-time simulation method of clouds, texture advection algorithms, fluid simulation, and other processes to achieve the results, the thesis offers a feasible design of the algorithm and experiments to test the hypotheses. The study uses noise textures and fractional Brownian motion (fBm) to generate volumetric clouds and render the clouds by the ray marching technique. The program will render user input vectors and a three-dimension interpolation vector field with OpenGL. By adding or changing input vectors, the user will gain a divergence minimization interpolation field. The cloud volume could be animated by the texture advection technique based on the interpolation vector field in real-time. By inputting several vectors, the user could plausibly animate the volume cloud in an art-directable way.</div>

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第19186号 / 工博第4063号 / 新制||工||1627(附属図書館) / 32178 / 京都大学大学院工学研究科電気工学専攻 / (主査)教授 小山田 耕二, 教授 小林 哲生, 教授 中村 裕一 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DFAM

[pt] Um dos principais desafios em algoritmos de visualização volumétrica é calcular a integral volumétrica de maneira eficiente, mantendo uma precisão mínima adequada. Geralmente, métodos de integração numérica utilizam passos de tamanho constante, não incluindo nenhuma estratégia de controle numérico. Como uma possível solução, métodos numéricos adaptativos podem ser utilizados, pois conseguem adaptar o tamanho do passo de integração dada uma tolerância de erro pré-definida. Em CPU, os algoritmos adaptativos de integração numérica são, normalmente, implementados recursivamente. Já em GPU, é desejável eliminar implementações recursivas. O presente trabalho propõe um algoritmo adaptativo e iterativo para a avaliação da integral volumétrica em malhas regulares, apresentando soluções para manter o controle do passo da integral interna e externa. Os resultados do trabalho buscaram comparar a precisão e eficiência do método proposto com o modelo de integração com passo de tamanho constante, utilizando a soma de Riemann. Verificou-se que o algoritmo proposto gerou resultados precisos, com desempenho competitivo. As comparações foram feitas em CPU e GPU. / [en] One of the main challenges in volume rendering algorithms is how to compute the Volume Rendering Integral accurately, while maintaining good performance. Commonly, numerical methods use equidistant samples to approximate the integral and do not include any error estimation strategy to control accuracy. As a solution, adaptive numerical methods can be used, because they can adapt the step size of the integration according to an estimated numerical error. On CPU, adaptive integration algorithms are usually implemented recursively. On GPU, however, it is desirable to eliminate recursive algorithms. In this work, an adaptive and iterative integration strategy is presented to evaluate the volume rendering integral for regular volumes, maintaining the control of the step size for both internal and external integrals. A set of computational experiments were made comparing both accuracy and efficiency against the Riemann summation with uniform step size. The proposed algorithm generates accurate results, with competitive performance. The comparisons were made using both CPU and GPU implementations.

Volumetric rendering is used to visualize volume data from e.g. scientific simulations. Many advanced applications use large gigabyte- or terabyte-sized data sets, which typically means that multiple compute nodes need to partake in the rendering process to achieve interactive frame rates. Load balancing is generally used to optimize the rendering performance. In existing load balancing techniques, nodes generally only render directly-connected data and handle load balancing based on data locality in kd-trees. This approach can result in redundant data transfers and unbalanced data distribution, which affect the frame rate and increase the hardware requirements of all nodes. In this thesis we present a novel load balancing technique for sort-last volume rendering which utilizes a group hierarchy. The technique allows nodes to render data from arbitrary positions in the volume, without inducing a costly image compositing stage. The technique is compared to a static load balancing technique as well as a dynamic kd-tree based load balancing technique. Our testing demonstrated that the presented technique performed better than or equal to the kd-tree based technique while also lowering the worst-case memory usage complexity of all nodes. Utilizing a group hierarchy effectively helped to lower the compositing time of the presented technique. / Volumetrisk rendering används för att visualisera bland annat vetenskapligasimuleringar. Inom avancerade användingsområden används ofta dataset med en storlek på flera gigabyte eller terabyte. Detta medför att flera noder ofta måste användas för att uppnå en interaktiv bildfrekvens. Belastningsutjämning används generellt för att optimera renderingsprestandan. I befintliga tekniker renderar noder vanligtvis endast direkt sammankopplad data och utför belastningsutjämning baserat på datalokalitet i kd-träd. Detta kan resultera i redundanta dataöverföringar och en obalanserad datadistribution, vilket påverkar bildfrekvensen och ökar hårdvarukraven för alla noder. I denna avhandling presenterar vi en ny teknik för belastningsutjämning för sort-last volumetrisk rendering som använder en grupphierarki. Tekniken tillåter noder att rendera data från godtyckliga positioner i volymen utan att förorsaka ett kostsamt steg för bildsammansättning. Tekniken jämförs med en statisk belastningsutjämningsteknik såväl som en dynamisk belastningsutjämningsteknik baserad på kd-träd. Våra tester visar att den presenterade tekniken presterar bättre eller likvärdigt med den kd-trädbaserade tekniken medan den samtidigt sänker minneskomplexiteten för alla noder. Användandet av en grupphierarki sänkte effektivt bildsammansättningstiden för den presenterade tekniken.