Because of the complex and fine structure, visualization of the heart still remains a challenging task, which makes it an active research topic. In this paper, we present a visualization system for medical data, which takes advantage of the recent graphics processing unit (GPU) and can provide real-time cardiac visualization. This work focuses on investigating the anatomical structure visualization of the human heart, which is fundamental to the cardiac visualization, medical training and diagnosis assistance. Several state-of-the-art cardiac visualization methods are integrated into the proposed system and a task specified visualization method is proposed. In addition, auxiliary tools are provided to generate user specified visualization results. The contributions of our work lie in two-fold: for doctors and medical staff, the system can provide task specified visualization with interactive visualization tools; for researchers, the proposed platform can serve as a baseline for comparing different rendering methods and can easily incorporate new rendering methods. Experimental results show that the proposed system can provide favorable cardiac visualization results in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.
Keywords: Cardiac imaging; GPU; Interactive visualization; Medical visualization system; Volume rendering.