GPU-Enabled Volume Renderer for Use with MATLAB

Abstract

Traditional tools, such as 3D Slicer, Fiji, and MATLAB®, often encounter limitations in rendering performance and data management as the dataset sizes increase. This work presents a GPU-enabled volume renderer with a MATLAB® interface that addresses these issues. The proposed renderer uses flexible memory management and leverages the GPU texture-mapping features of NVIDIA devices. It transfers data between the CPU and the GPU only in the case of a data change between renderings, and uses texture memory to make use of specific hardware benefits of the GPU and improve the quality. A case study using the ViBE-Z zebrafish larval dataset demonstrated the renderer’s ability to produce visualizations while managing extensive data effectively within the MATLAB® environment. The renderer is available as open-source software.

Keywords

• imaging
• three-dimensional
• biomedical image processing
• medical image processing
• visualization
• direct volume rendering