Siemens Medical Solutions Usa, Inc.

Siemens Aktiengesellschaft

Siemens Corporation

Wei Li

Daphne Yu

Gianluca Paladini

Feng Qiu

Wei Hong

Christoph Vetter

Qinglin Ma

Methods and systems for luggage visualization perform virtual unpacking by visually moving an object image away from its original pose. A scanned 3D volume is segmented guided by a confidence measure to create a label volume whose voxels specify the detected object IDs. The luggage dataset and the label volume are visualized by volume rendering. Using an automatic coloring algorithm, any pair of objects whose projections are adjacent in an image are assigned distinct hues. A layered framework efficiently renders a scene mixed with packed luggage, animated unpacking objects, and already unpacked objects put aside for further inspection. A GPU is used to automatically select objects that are not blocked by others and can be unpacked.

Luggage visualization and virtual unpacking

A method that includes receiving vertices of a mesh, wherein the mesh represents a volume of interest (VOI) from an original volume, performing a transformation operation on the mesh, wherein the transformation operation transforms vertices of the mesh, obtaining sampling locations of the original volume using the transformed vertices, performing an inverse transformation on the transformed vertices of the mesh and the sampling locations, and performing a ray casting on the original volume to produce an image, wherein the ray casting uses the transformed vertices and a result of the inverse transformation as input.

Floating volume-of-interest in multilayer volume ray casting

A method for tracing a plurality of virtual particles through a flow filed includes receiving a flow field. A flow domain is divided into cells. Virtual particles are defined within the flow domain and values are collected for flow properties at each cell. A histogram is generated for each cell representing the collected flow properties for that corresponding cell. The histogram includes, for each of the one or more flow properties, a plurality of bins defining ranges of property values and a count of virtual particles within that cell that exhibit those properties. The histograms for the plurality of cells are advected with respect to the flow field over time. A graphical representation of the plurality of particles within the flow domain is rendered based on the advected histograms for the plurality of cells using a graphics processor.

Selective flow visualization of traced particles

A method () of computing and displaying flow information of vascular blood flow patterns, especially in the form of quantitative data plots.

Method for vascular flow pattern analysis

A method for rendering a deformable object. The method includes: obtaining a 3D volumetric voxel dataset of a region, such region having therein an object to be rendered; building a tree hierarchical structure for the obtained volumetric dataset, such tree structure blocks as the nodes of a primary tree hierarchy and bricks being those blocks stored as textures in a video memory; augmenting the primary tree hierarchical structure with maximum and minimum values of the data contained within a block; creating a neighborhood tree hierarchy having for each leaf block of the neighborhood tree hierarchy a reference to the neighboring leaf blocks in the neighborhood tree hierarchy as well as references to neighboring bricks in the neighborhood tree hierarchy; updating the information about minimum and maximum in the primary tree hierarchy by saving for each block the minimum and maximum of the neighboring blocks; and rendering the leaf blocks in visibility order.

Method for direct volumetric rendering of deformable bricked volumes

A computer implemented method for creating a depth range buffer for supporting clipping geometries for ray-casting includes inputting image data, establishing a depth range buffer for specifying a start and an end point of each ray, computing a near depth of the image data corresponding to the start point of each ray, computing a far depth of the image data corresponding to the end point of each ray, clipping the volume by restricting ray-casting within the start and end points of the depth range buffer, and rendering a portion of the image data corresponding to the visible depth range.

Clipping geometries in ray-casting

A method for volume rendering a volumetric dataset with multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) coupled to a computer system, comprises building a block hierarchical structure of blocks for the volumetric dataset, the block hierarchy comprising a block sequence; partitioning the block sequence into a plurality of groups; determining a target work load for each GPU; allocating each group of the plurality to a respective GPU in accordance with the target load; rendering respective intermediate images by the respective GPUs; and compositing for a final image by blending the respective intermediate images.

Apparatus and method for volume rendering on multiple graphics processing units (GPUs)

Mip-map construction is provided for three-dimensional rendering from an anisotropic dataset. One or more mip-map levels are generated by down sampling in the world space rather than texture space. The down sampling may be by an arbitrary scale factor rather than a power of two. For example, the voxels may be down sampled along one dimension by less than half (e.g., 16 to 12). The scale factors may be different along different dimensions. This non-uniform reduction in voxels may result in the mip-map being more isotropic than the anisotropic dataset.

MIP-map for rendering of an anisotropic dataset

Described herein is a system and method for facilitating large volume data processing and rendering. An exemplary system includes at least one processor coupled to a first memory, wherein the processor is configured to organize the large volume data in the first memory into one or more bricks. In addition, at least one graphics processing unit (GPU) is coupled to the processor and a second memory. The GPU is configured to process at least one or more bricks transferred from the first memory to the second memory to produce intermediate processing results, and to further render the intermediate processing results.

Framework for processing and rendering large volume data

Ultrasound imaging is synchronized with measurements. Generating three-dimensional representations is synchronized with measuring one or more parameters. For example, measurements are preformed based on navigating through a volume. The measurements are linked to the corresponding three-dimensional representations. As another example, the user selects a measurement from a graph. A three-dimensional representation of the volume associated with the selected measurement is presented.

Synchronized three or four-dimensional medical ultrasound imaging and measurements

A method for combining at image data sets to generate a composite image. The method divides each of the data sets into a plurality of bricks along three mutually orthogonal axes. The method includes (a) building a hierarchical structure for each one of the at least two data sets, each structure comprising higher level blocks of voxels and lower level blocks of voxels, the higher level blocks having a larger number of voxels than the lower level blocks; (b) expanding boundaries of each one of the structures into corresponding expanded hierarchical structures, such boundary expanding comprising adding additional virtual processing bricks to the initial processing bricks, such virtual processing bricks comprising semi-unbounded blocks to provide the expanded boundaries of the expanded hierarchical structures; and (c) rendering each one of the bricks in each one of the expanded hierarchical structures into a two dimension image.

Brick-based fusion renderer

A memory manager interfaces between a rendering application and the driver controlling one or more memories. A multi-level brick cache system caches bricks in a memory hierarchy to accelerate the rendering. One example memory hierarchy may include system memory, AGP memory, and graphics memory. The memory manager allows control of brick overwriting based on current or past rendering. Since different memories are typically available, one or more memory managers may control storage of bricks into different memories to optimize rendering. Management of different memory levels, overwriting based on current or previous rendering, and an interfacing memory manager may each be used alone or in any possible combination.

Memory management system and method for GPU-based volume rendering

A method for rendering a two-dimensional image comprising: (a) obtaining a first three-dimensional set of data for a relatively high quality image; (b) generating a second three-dimensional set of data for a relatively low quality image from the obtained three-dimensional set of data; (c) rendering a relatively low quality two-dimensional image from second three-dimensional set of data; (d) rendering a first portion of a relatively high quality two-dimensional image from a first portion of the first three-dimensional set of data; (e) blending the rendered low quality two-dimensional image with relatively high quality two-dimensional image; (f) rendering a second portion of a relatively high quality two-dimensional image from a different portion of the first three-dimensional set of data; and (g) blending the rendered low quality two-dimensional image from second three-dimensional set of data with relatively high quality two-dimensional image from the second portion of the first three-dimensional set of data. The process repeats until the entire image is rendered.

Progressive refinement for texture-based volume rendering

Rendering with a punching mask is performed without voxelization. A plurality of sub-volumes are identified as a function of the punching mask. The sub-volumes are generally layered in range. Each sub-volume is rendered separately or independently. The renderings from multiple passes or sub-volumes are composited together.

Range-peeling for punching masks in volume rendering

An exemplary method of combining two images to form a fused image is provided. A hierarchical structure for each of a plurality of volumes is built. All blocks in each of the hierarchical structures that intersect a slicing plane are found. Each of the plurality of volumes is divided into stacks of parallel slices, and the parallel slices are sorted by visibility order. A next slice in the sorted parallel slices is chosen. The next slice belongs to a current volume. Rendering parameters are changed if the current volume is different from a previous volume associated with the chosen slice in a previous iteration of the step of choosing the slice. Based on the rendering parameters, the next slice is rendered by intersecting the slicing plane with the blocks corresponding to the current volume. The steps of choosing the slice, changing the rendering parameters, and rendering the slice are repeated until all of the sorted parallel slices are rendered.

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Princeton, NJ, United States of America

Wei Li