An open graphics library (OPENGL) based toolbox for biomedical display and processing

Abstract

By the development of Computerized Tomography (CT) in the late 70's and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) at the beginning of 80's, three dimensional images of the human body were generated in terms of slices of 2-D images. The availability of 3-D images gives researchers a better morphological, relational, and functional as-sessment of the anatomical structures. An Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) based image display and processing toolbox, called 3DVIEW, has been developed for the 3-D visualization of human tissues using the MRI/CT data. The 3-D rendering and visual-ization are performed via the OpenGL library routines while the basic image processing routines and Windows based Graphics User Interface (GUI) are developed using the Borland Object Windows 2.0 programming Language and Borland C++ Version 4.5 compiler. The toolbox is capable of displaying the MRI/CT images in 2-D and 3-D as well as performing basic image processing techniques such as filtering, edge enhance-ment, and histogram watching. The Seeded Region Growing Algorithm (SRGA) is also included for the segmentation and 3-D visualization of different tissues. The toolbox is aimed to be an interface to which someone studying biomedical images can add other functions to perform his/her routine analysis and visualization.