Virtual interaction and visualisation of 3D medical imaging data with VTK and unity

Gavin Wheeler; Shujie Deng; Nicolas Toussaint; Kuberan Pushparajah; Julia A. Schnabel; John M. Simpson; Alberto Gomez

doi:10.1049/htl.2018.5064

Virtual interaction and visualisation of 3D medical imaging data with VTK and unity

Gavin Wheeler^*, Shujie Deng, Nicolas Toussaint, Kuberan Pushparajah, Julia A. Schnabel, John M. Simpson, Alberto Gomez

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

62 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	148-153
Number of pages	6
Journal	Healthcare Technology Letters
Volume	5
Issue number	5
Early online date	12 Nov 2018
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1049/htl.2018.5064
Publication status	Published - 2018

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10.1049/htl.2018.5064Licence: CC BY

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Virtual interaction and visualisation of 3D medical imaging data with VTK and unity

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