Volumetric View of Tomography Images Within a RAVE Environment

Flurchick, Ken         (252) 328-2669

Assistant Professor and Visualization Scientist

Physics and CIITR

East Carolina University

First co-presenter:	Xin-Hua, Hu
Organization:	East Carolina University

Abstract (up to 200 words):
Computed tomography (CT) has been widely used in health care to reconstruct three-dimensional (3D) images from multiple projections of a patient for diagnosing diseases or tracking therapeutic processes. Therefore, teaching of the CT principle is a very important part of medical imaging courses for medical physics students, especially for those in graduate programs. However, the combined difficulty in teaching the abstract mathematical operations used in CT and visualization of CT data has presented a significant roadblock for students to gain a command of the technology in a teaching environment of a conventional classroom. We present here a recent project to introduce our medical physics students to the CT principles using the system known as the RAVE [1] for 3D virtual reality display of the CT data. With the developed visualization system, the students are presented with multiple volumetric view of the CT images and allowed to navigate through the visualization to select different view angles or structures. With this visualization system, we were able to provide students with the effect of 3D volumetric view of the CT images that have not been used in the teaching of medical imaging. More importantly, the success of this project has demonstrated the possibility of using the latest 3D visualization tools to significantly improve the teaching quality of abstract imaging principles.

Session type:
Short presentation (20 minutes)

Time slots:
C1 - Th 2:00 - 2:45

Room:
Grandover E

Last Modified September 9, 2003
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