Research On Contours-Based Visualization

Scientific calculated visualization is very important in various domains. Visualization on serial contours is an important method of scientific calculated visualization. In order to present the visual information to doctors, reconstructing the prostate's 3-D surface on serial images is needed by the project named Development of a New Image-Guided Prostate Biopsy System. So the visualization on serial contours is researched. The visualization system is designed and realized with the C# programming language in .NET platform.The system of visualization on serial contours is composed of four steps. The first step is getting the edge contours of object that will be reconstructed from the 2-D images. Robert arithmetic operator is used to segment the images. After that the contours of prostate are very clear. Then the contours are outlines by hand and the coordinate data sets are obtained by tracking contour method. The manual method is very simply and it is practical.The second step is interpolating some new contours between two contours witch is next to each other. Because the distance of contours at z-axis is bigger than the distance of contours at x-axis and y-axis, it is needed to create serial new contours between original contours to form the symmetrical 3-D data field. It is the method that gets the contour's points by an equal angle and then interpolates with linearity interpolation algorithm.The third step is plotting triangles, which is the algorithm of reconstructing 3-D object's surface by linking the points of two contours to become a serial of triangles without intersecting each other. A new method is used, which combines the shortest diagonal algorithm with the synchronous forward algorithm. Because the new method get both of the advantage of two methods, the time of reconstruction is short and the surface result is good. The last step is 3-D display in computer. We can show the 3-D object with Managed DirectX class library in .NET platform. The 3-D object can be translated and rotated by mouse conveniently.