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MatVTK - 3D Visualization for Matlab

Birngruber, Erich, Donner, René, Langs, Georg
Computational Image Analysis and Radiology Lab, Department of Radiology, Medical University of Vienna, Austria
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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this publication: http://hdl.handle.net/10380/3076
New: Prefer using the following doi: https://doi.org/10.54294/9cjzxq
Published in The MIDAS Journal - MICCAI 2009 Workshop: Systems and Architectures for Computer Assisted Interventions.
Submitted by Erich Birngruber on 2009-08-25 10:55:09.

The rapid and flexible visualization of large amounts of com- plex data has become a crucial part in medical image analysis. In re- cent years the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) has evolved as the de-facto standard for open-source medical data visualization. It features a clean design based on a data flow paradigm, which the existing wrappers for VTK (Python, Tcl/Tk, Simulink) closely follow. This allows to elegantly model many types of algorithms, but presents a steep learning curve for beginners. In contrast to existing approaches we propose a framework for accessing VTK’s capabilities from within MATLAB, using a syntax which closely follows MATLAB’s graphics primitives. While providing users with the advanced, fast 3D visualization capabilities MATLAB does not provide, it is easy to learn while being flexible enough to allow for complex plots, large amounts of data and combinations of visualiza- tions. The proposed framework will be made available as open source with detailed documentation and example data sets.