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

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.

Keywords

• augmented reality
• data visualisation
• rendering (computer graphics)
• computerised tomography
• medical image processing
• 3D medical imaging data
• virtual reality displays
• mixed reality displays
• manipulation devices
• medical image applications
• virtual environments
• VTK objects
• Unity scene
• Unity native plugin
• simple Unity application
• cardiac magnetic resonance images
• current augmented reality/virtual reality display devices
• augmented reality displays
• interaction devices
• Unity widespread support
• visualisation toolkit
• visualisation capabilities
• OpenGL context
• VTK volume rendering
• thoracic computed tomography
• time 3.0 d