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Objective: Volume segmentation with concurrent visualization is becoming an increasingly important part of medical diagnostics. This is due to the fact that the immediate visual feedback speeds up evaluation of the segmentation process, hence enhances segmentation quality. Therefore, our aim was to develop a method for volume segmentation and smoothing which achieves interactive performance on standard PCs and is useful in clinical practice (i.e. fast and of high quality).Methods: Our application is based on seeded region growing and nonlinear isotropic as well as anisotropic diffusion. We use current GPUs (graphics processing units) to speed up the computation of the diffusion process and use hardware-accelerated interactive volume rendering.Results: Using our approach the user can observe the diffusion process in real-time, change parameters interactively and view the result in a high-quality 3D direct volume rendering (DVR).Conclusion: The interactive nature of our algorithm and simultaneous visualization improved the usability of our segmentation and smoothing algorithm and proved useful in the clinical workflow. Using our application we were able to speed up the (an)isotropic diffusion process to achieve interactive performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opacity transfer function (OTF) generation for direct volume rendering of medical image data is an intensely discussed subject. Several automatic methods exist for CT and MRI data, which are not apt for ultrasound data, mainly due to its low signal-to-noise ratio. Furthermore, ultrasound (US) imaging is able to produce time-varying 3D datasets in real time thus opening the door to 4D visualization. However, OTF design for 4D datasets has not been exhaustively discussed until now. We present an efficient solution to generate an optimized OTF for a given 3DUS dataset in real time. Our method results in excellent visualization which we demonstrate using 3D fetus datasets. Finally, we discuss the applicability of our method to 4DUS visualization.