Open AccessVirtual interaction and visualisation of 3D medical imaging data with VTK and Unity
Author(s) -
Wheeler Gavin,
Deng Shujie,
Toussaint Nicolas,
Pushparajah Kuberan,
Schnabel Julia A.,
Simpson John M.,
Gomez Alberto
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
healthcare technology letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.45
H-Index - 19
ISSN - 2053-3713
DOI - 10.1049/htl.2018.5064
Subject(s) - computer science , visualization , computer graphics (images) , virtual reality , plug in , opengl , augmented reality , volume rendering , rendering (computer graphics) , medical imaging , dicom , computer vision , context (archaeology) , artificial intelligence , paleontology , biology , programming language
The authors present a method to interconnect the Visualisation Toolkit (VTK) and Unity. This integration enables them to exploit the visualisation capabilities of VTK with Unity's widespread support of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality displays, and interaction and manipulation devices, for the development of medical image applications for virtual environments. The proposed method utilises OpenGL context sharing between Unity and VTK to render VTK objects into the Unity scene via a Unity native plugin. The proposed method is demonstrated in a simple Unity application that performs VTK volume rendering to display thoracic computed tomography and cardiac magnetic resonance images. Quantitative measurements of the achieved frame rates show that this approach provides over 90 fps using standard hardware, which is suitable for current augmented reality/virtual reality display devices.