Which SDK should I use to visualize medical images in 3D?

Question

I need to process DICOM formatted medical images and visualize them in 3D, also do some image processing on these images on real-time. Therefore, I am asking this question to learn which SDK has better real-time characteristics for medical visualization and image processing?

Answer 1

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is an open-source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing and visualization.

You can find details here.

Or another solution would be the modifying or utilizing 3D engine that supports volume rendering.

Moreover, for computer vision algorithms, OpenCV seems promising.

Answer 2

osgVolume is an add-in to the popular openscenegraph library for doing this

Answer 3

Just use GDCM+VTK. In 2D simply use gdcmviewer. In 3D you need to build gdcmorthoplanes.

Ref: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/gdcm/index.php?title=Gdcmviewer

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/gdcm/index.php?title=Using_GDCM_API

Answer 4

You could check out MITK (http://mitk.org) which combines the already mentioned VTK with the Insight Toolkit (http://www.itk.org) for image processing. Another option to start from could be Slicer (http://www.slicer.org), but this depends on the license you need.

Answer 5

In a uni we were taught Matlab for DICOM file processing. I think it has pretty nice and easy to use plugins for that as well. The end results were that using Matlab I was able to do all kinds of DICOM image processing, filtering and so forth.

As you probably know, Matlab is not SDK but a complete environment. Nevertheless you can write scripts to achieve normal application behavior: Create windows, buttons, images, etc.