The Vaidak Medical Imaging Toolkit

Vaidak is an X11 based toolkit for the visualization, manipulation and recosntruction from CT and MRI data. Volume medical data may be visualized directly, or surface and solid models may be generated which can be used in custom prosthesis design and robotic simulations.

Two methods of solid reconstruction are used. The first method requires contours to be generated for key slices in the MRI volume. Adjacent contours are then connected by a triangle mesh using heuristic or optimal algorithms. The optimal algorithm can be configured to minimize the length of added edges or minimize the area of generated triangles. Click on the images below to get a full screen image of a reconstructed ear or full head from an MRI scan.

Solids may also be reconstructed by extracting isosurfaces in the volume data. Several algorithms may be used for this. The algorithms implemented in Vaidak are Marching Cubes, Marching Tetrahedra, and the SpiderWeb algorithm.

Volume rendering allows the user to bypass the reconstruction and view the volume directly. The rendering approach used in Vaidak is that of Ray Casting. A ray is cast from each pixel in the image space through the volume being rendered. Data values in the volume map to color and opacity values given in a colormap. Transparency allows the user to view the inside of a volume as well as the outside, as in this rendering of a cadaver:

Skeleton Mpeg

Skeleton Movie

Skeleton Quicktime