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Segment-aware carving of volumes

Key Investigators

Project Description

The goal of this project is to implement segment-aware carving mechanism, that will make it possible to clip specific user-defined segments when rendering a medical volume. This will allow users to create very customized visualizations tailored for specific needs, like anatomy learning or preoperative planning. Eventually, the goal is to add a VR interactions, as demonstrated in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFl7LF5hWxI

Objective

  1. Implement a segment-aware clipping occlusion management technique, which may be useful for anatomy learning or preoperative planning.

Approach and Plan

  1. Decide upon the best architecture (OpenGL or WebGPU) to achieve the task
  2. Implement segment-awake clipping
  3. Add VR interactions

Progress and Next Steps

  1. This project has already been implemented in Unity, and the goal of this project is to port it to 3D Slicer. However, the Unity implementation relies a lot on compute shader
  2. An approach to fill a volume shader and then pass to to the fragment shader has been tested, however,

Illustrations

Image

Background and References

Article describing the occlusion management technique was submitted to the ISMAR 2025 conference.

Relevant technique for unsegmented data: A. Joshi, D. Scheinost, K. Vives, D. Spencer, L. Staib, and X. Papademetris, “Novel interaction techniques for neurosurgical planning and stereotactic navigation,” IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 1587–1594, Nov. 2008, doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2008.150.