A Fast hierarchical traversal strategy for multimodal visualization

Abstract

In the last years there is a growing demand of multimodal medical rendering systems able to visualize simultaneously data coming from different sources. This paper addresses the Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) of aligned multimodal data in medical applications. Specifically, it proposes a hierarchical representation of the multimodal data set based on the construction of a Fusion Decision Tree (FDT) that, together with a run-length encoding of the non-empty data, provides means of efficiently accessing to the data. Three different implementations of these structures are proposed. The simulations results show that the traversal of the data is fast and that the method is suitable when interactive modifications of the fusion parameters are required.