Master's Thesis - Studierstube Augmented Reality Project - Graz ...

Abstract
This thesis describes a workflow to obtain high level, hardware accelerated
scientific visualizations from the measurement of four dimensional cardiac
blood flow data through phase contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PC-
MRI). Extending an existing medical data viewer, called iMEDgine, which
is based on Coin3D, an open source scene graph library, enabled the implementation
of point based and sparse velocity field visualizations with
an additional presentation of the underlying anatomical image data. The
workflow includes a preprocessing of the raw data with a Toolbox provided
by Siemens Medical Solutions. To evaluate the results of the presented visualization
algorithms several real human heart datasets and an additional
artificial flow phantom setup were measured with different parameters. The
results of these sequences showed that a high-level visualization may provide
a deeper insight in the cardiac cycle for diagnostic and research purposes.
Keywords: phase contrast magnetic resonance imaging; PC-MRI; cardiac
blood flow; artificial flow phantom; scientific visualization; flow visualization;
scene-graph; Cash-flow; iMEDgine; GPGPU