Medical Visualization: Egyptology in 3D
VGStudio Max 2.0: Breakthrough Visualization on the Mac
At its formation in 2005, the MAAT3D team began creating visualizations from medical scans using OsiriX, an open-source imaging application, but they needed a different ray tracing engine with features such as shadowing for the museum-quality presentations they planned to create. They investigated VGStudio Max, a visualization and analysis software system developed by Volume Graphics GmbH. MAAT3D now creates its visualizations using VGStudio Max 2.0, which includes a powerful new rendering engine.
“VGStudio Max 2.0 is superb for our purposes,” says Moreno. “There’s no need for translators; we can import DICOM data directly and do many more things with it on the Mac than we can on a classic CT workstation. And you can see details with VG 2.0 that you can’t see with other software applications.”
The VGStudio Max 2.0 release introduced new technology, such as shadowing, which gives MAAT3D a better impression of volume and better control of colors. From an Egyptology standpoint, its most interesting feature is the ability to visually extract and separate structures. It enables the team to make the mummy’s cartonnage and wrappings transparent, yet visible, to provide a clear three-dimensional view of the body inside. MAAT3D does all this visualization exclusively on the Mac.
“Volume Graphics runs on multiple platforms, so we had a hardware choice to make,” says Moreno. “For us, the biggest single advantage of the Mac is the sheer stability of Mac OS X. It gives us more time to do our work, instead of coping with the bugs and restarts we get on other platforms. It’s also easier to work with. And Mac workstations are less expensive than others such as Dell. Putting price, efficiency, and stability together, we came up with the Mac.
“The Mac platform is an all-in-one solution for us. We create VG models on it, then use it for video and movie postproduction for museum presentations that will eventually be presented on iPods. VGStudio Max exports our visualizations directly as QuickTime movies. We use all the tools of the Final Cut Pro Suite to produce animations, including Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, and Motion 2. We also use Shake for special effects content creation.”
When Moreno and his colleagues moved from the Power Mac G5 to the Intel-based Mac Pro, their visualizations suddenly went from hurry-up-and-wait to real time. “We typically waited 20 seconds for a rendering on the G5,” says Moreno. “But with the Xeon processors the Mac Pro can visualize a 4.5GB dataset in real time. Scanner datasets keep growing, and with Leopard we can address a larger memory allocation. Its full 64-bit OS enables us to run applications that address massive amounts of memory, so we can visualize very large datasets. It used to take an SGI workstation, or the equivalent, to do this work. But now anyone will be able to access these big datasets with [Mac OS X] Leopard on a Mac.”
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VGStudio Max 2.0: Detail without Limits
The CT scanners used to scan mummies and live patients are capable of delivering enormous amounts of detail. On some mummies, the scan slices have shrunk from 0.5mm to 0.2mm, generating massive datasets of 16GB or more.
Most software packages that are used to create visualizations of this data are limited by the graphics processing units (GPUs) of the workstations they run on. VGStudio Max does things differently.
“We can achieve real-time performance on these very large datasets because we use the ray tracing approach,” says Volume Graphics Managing Director Christof Reinhart. “It’s more or less independent of the amount of data in your scene. It doesn’t matter if you have 100MB or 16GB in your scene — we’re just visualizing it. We can easily render HDTV-size images in real time.
“We can outperform even high-end graphics card because they’re memory-limited. The largest GPU card you can buy has only 1GB on board. That means that if you were working with a 16GB dataset, you’d be swapping data in and out of that memory, and you would be unable to achieve interactive performance. But VGStudio Max uses system memory, so we can provide real-time display.
“VGStudio Max 2.0 has a totally new rendering core that raises rendering quality to even higher levels. It supports a direct export into QuickTime, which will simplify the creation of movies and animations.”
At a Glance
The 3D visualization specialists at MAAT3D, a French association of scientists and educators, sought a way to improve the visualization of mummies, the treatment of patients needing reconstructive facial surgery, and the creation of medical illustrations. They also wanted to display visualizations of mummies more effectively to museum audiences. They needed a powerful, stable computing platform that would provide faster rendering at reduced hardware costs.
