Copyright © 2013 Yakang Dai et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

3D medical images are widely used to assist diagnosis and surgical planning in clinical applications, where quantitative measurement of interesting objects in the image is of great importance. Volume rendering is widely used for qualitative visualization of 3D medical images. In this paper, we introduce a volume-rendering-based interactive 3D measurement framework for quantitative analysis of 3D medical images. In the framework, 3D widgets and volume clipping are integrated with volume rendering. Specifically, 3D plane widgets are manipulated to clip the volume to expose interesting objects. 3D plane widgets, 3D line widgets, and 3D angle widgets are then manipulated to measure the areas, distances, and angles of interesting objects. The methodology of the proposed framework is described. Experimental results indicate the performance of the interactive 3D measurement framework.