Collaborative biomedical data exploration in distributed virtual environments.

Abstract

Imaging techniques such as MRI, fMRI, CT and PET have provided doctors with a means to acquire high-resolution biomedical images that serve as the foundation for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Experts with a multitude of backgrounds, including radiologists, anatomists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists now collaboratively analyze the same images to extract a better understanding of the encoded information. Unfortunately, access to these specialists at the same physical location is not always possible and new tools and techniques are required to facilitate simultaneous and collaborative exploration of volumetric data between spatially separated domain experts. This paper presents CVMED, a collaborative visualization environment for volumetric biomedical data-sets, supporting heterogeneous hardware, rendering and display systems connected via heterogeneous networks. CVMED provides the user with the algorithms and tools for stereoscopic as well as monoscopic data visualization and annotation along with the middleware needed to exchange the resulting visuals between all participants in real-time.