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Collaborative Exploration of Medical Datasets using Virtual Environments
Eric Klein, and Oliver G. Staadt
Abstract
This work is conducted in cooperation with the U.S. Navy's Naval Research Laboratory's (NRL) Virtual Reality Laboratory. The primary goal of the research is to facilitate better understanding of marine mammal hearing. Ultimately, this project will consist of an application allowing researchers from several institutions to explore marine mammal data sets from virtual environments simultaneously over the internet.
The early stages of this work have involved building a rapid prototype application the view DICOM data from MRI scans of dolphin. Our initial configuration used VRPN, VR Juggler, Open Scene Graph and the Visualization Toolkit to generate an isosurface (non-interactively) from the data, and allow users to explore that isosurface in a virtual environment. The two environments involved in our early work have been the UC Davis VR lab's large stereo tiled display wall, and NRL's CAVE environment. We are now doing work to incorporate direct volume rendering of the data using OpenSG, as well as interactive editing of the transfer functions using VR interfaces. The next stage will be to begin the collaborative aspects of the research, and to try and identify the most useful collaboration techniques for interactive visualization sessions across several sites.
This work is supported by the U.S. Navy's Naval Research Laboratory's Virtual Research Lab.
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