A Novel Interface for Interactive Exploration of DTI Fibers


Abstract

Visual exploration is essential to the visualization and analysis of densely sampled 3D DTI fibers, due to the high geometric, spatial and anatomical complexity of fiber tracts. Previous methods for DTI fiber visualization use zooming, color-mapping, selection, and abstraction to deliver the characteristics of the fibers. However, these schemes mainly focus on the optimization of visualization in 3D space where cluttering and occlusion make it difficult to grasp even a few thousands of fibers. This paper introduces a novel dual-interface interaction method that augments the 3D visualization with a 2D representation that contains the low-dimensional embedding of the DTI fibers. This embedding preserves the relationship between the fibers and removes the visual clutter that is inherent in 3D renderings of the fibers. The new dual dual-interface allows the users to manipulate the DTI fibers as both 3D curves and 2D embedded points, and easily compare or validate their results in both domains. The implementation of the framework is GPU-based to achieve real-time interaction. The framework was applied to several tasks and the result shows that our method reduces the users' workload in recognizing 3D DTI fibers and permits quick and accurate DTI fiber selection.

Information

Web Demo:

Classification Tools Visualization Tools Manipulation Tools Home Atlas-based Clustering

Openg Source Code

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dtiexplorer/

Software:

Program.zip (27M)

Before running, please make sure you read and perform the following operations:

1)Program.zip includes the executable files, a user manual, vcredist_x86.zip, and four datasets, of which two brain datasets can be used to test Atlas-based clustering (using DATASET_BRAIN_1 as a template, i.e., the classified one).

2) Please refer to UserManual.doc for some simple instructions before you run it;

3) Before trying, please unzip vcredist_x86.zip and install it;

4) Click \bin\DualInterface.exe to start the software, load the datasets located in \Data\, and play!

4) This software is a simplified version of our system and can only run in Windows OS. Seldomly, when you meet the flickering problem, please turn on to "Full" of the Hardware Acceleration in the video card's properties-->Troubleshot panel.

Five Video Clips Showing Components and Three Case Studies (*.MOV):

1) Other visualization schemes (Ellipsoid and Streamtubes) play

2) Multiple-box ROIs determination play

3) Volume Filter play

4) FA Statistics play

5) RGB_coded by orientation play

6) Embedded DTI fiber clustering on a pig leg dataset play

7) Dual Domain CLustering for a pig heart model play

8) Atlas-based clustering for brain models play