Fischer Felix, Selver M Alper, Gezer Sinem, Dicle Oğuz, Hillen Walter
FH-Aachen, Juelich Division, Medical Informatics Laboratory, Aachen, Germany ; Nautavis GmbH, Linnich, Germany.
Electrical & Electronics Engineering Department, Dokuz Eylul University, 35160 Izmir, Turkey.
J Med Biol Eng. 2015;35(6):709-723. doi: 10.1007/s40846-015-0097-5. Epub 2015 Nov 18.
Tomographic medical imaging systems produce hundreds to thousands of slices, enabling three-dimensional (3D) analysis. Radiologists process these images through various tools and techniques in order to generate 3D renderings for various applications, such as surgical planning, medical education, and volumetric measurements. To save and store these visualizations, current systems use snapshots or video exporting, which prevents further optimizations and requires the storage of significant additional data. The Grayscale Softcopy Presentation State extension of the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard resolves this issue for two-dimensional (2D) data by introducing an extensive set of parameters, namely 2D Presentation States (2DPR), that describe how an image should be displayed. 2DPR allows storing these parameters instead of storing parameter applied images, which cause unnecessary duplication of the image data. Since there is currently no corresponding extension for 3D data, in this study, a DICOM-compliant object called 3D presentation states (3DPR) is proposed for the parameterization and storage of 3D medical volumes. To accomplish this, the 3D medical visualization process is divided into four tasks, namely pre-processing, segmentation, post-processing, and rendering. The important parameters of each task are determined. Special focus is given to the compression of segmented data, parameterization of the rendering process, and DICOM-compliant implementation of the 3DPR object. The use of 3DPR was tested in a radiology department on three clinical cases, which require multiple segmentations and visualizations during the workflow of radiologists. The results show that 3DPR can effectively simplify the workload of physicians by directly regenerating 3D renderings without repeating intermediate tasks, increase efficiency by preserving all user interactions, and provide efficient storage as well as transfer of visualized data.
断层扫描医学成像系统会生成数百到数千个切片，从而实现三维（3D）分析。放射科医生通过各种工具和技术来处理这些图像，以便为各种应用生成3D渲染图，如手术规划、医学教育和容积测量。为了保存和存储这些可视化图像，当前系统使用快照或视频导出，这阻碍了进一步优化，并且需要存储大量额外数据。医学数字成像和通信（DICOM）标准的灰度软拷贝呈现状态扩展通过引入一组广泛的参数，即二维呈现状态（2DPR），来解决二维（2D）数据的这一问题，该参数描述了图像应如何显示。2DPR允许存储这些参数而不是存储应用了参数的图像，后者会导致图像数据的不必要重复。由于目前尚无针对3D数据的相应扩展，因此在本研究中，提出了一种符合DICOM标准的对象，称为3D呈现状态（3DPR），用于3D医学容积的参数化和存储。为此，将3D医学可视化过程分为四个任务，即预处理、分割、后处理和渲染。确定了每个任务的重要参数。特别关注分割数据的压缩、渲染过程的参数化以及3DPR对象的符合DICOM标准的实现。在放射科对三个临床病例测试了3DPR的使用，这三个病例在放射科医生的工作流程中需要多次分割和可视化。结果表明，3DPR可以通过直接重新生成3D渲染图而无需重复中间任务来有效简化医生的工作量，通过保留所有用户交互来提高效率，并提供可视化数据的高效存储和传输。
