Kim Jinman, Cai Weidong, Feng Dagan
Sch. of Information Technol., Sydney Univ., NSW.
Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2005;2006:642-5. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2005.1616495.
Recent advances in medical imaging have resulted in the introduction of dual-modality scanners which can simultaneously acquire two independent imaging modalities, such as positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) image data in a single session. These multi-dimensional PET-CT data contain both the functional and anatomical information of the human body, thus, providing the ability to identify anatomical structures of interest and then overlaying the result onto the corresponding functional structure, as an example. The utilization of the combined functional and anatomical information has been proven to be an effective approach in diagnosis and interpretation of certain medical conditions. However, the increase in image dimensions has not been accompanied with new visualization techniques, with the use of two-dimensional (2D) display being the norm. In this study, we propose a new approach to three-dimensional (3D) visualization of dual-modality PET-CT data in order to complement the 2D visualization and potentially improve medical diagnosis and interpretation. We have design and implemented a prototype visualization technique using real-time volume rendering and image fusion running on a commodity graphics card. We further propose the application of interactive segmentation of 3D anatomical structures from CT data which can be used to identify the corresponding functional structure in volume visualization.
医学成像技术的最新进展带来了双模态扫描仪的问世，这种扫描仪能够在一次扫描中同时获取两种独立的成像模态，例如正电子发射断层扫描（PET）和计算机断层扫描（CT）图像数据。这些多维PET-CT数据包含了人体的功能和解剖信息，因此，例如能够识别感兴趣的解剖结构，然后将结果叠加到相应的功能结构上。功能和解剖信息相结合的利用已被证明是诊断和解读某些病症的有效方法。然而，图像维度的增加并未伴随着新的可视化技术，二维（2D）显示的使用仍是常态。在本研究中，我们提出一种用于双模态PET-CT数据三维（3D）可视化的新方法，以补充二维可视化，并有可能改善医学诊断和解读。我们设计并实现了一种使用实时体绘制和图像融合的原型可视化技术，该技术运行在商用图形卡上。我们还提出了从CT数据中交互式分割三维解剖结构的应用，这可用于在体可视化中识别相应的功能结构。
