Development of virtual reality system for medical application using OpenGL

Three dimensional (3D) visualization is a very popular topic in the medical community. Many techniques and procedures have been proposed and discussed to further improve this revolutionary medical imaging method. While resources regarding this matter are redundant, they are often scattered and only cover a specific part of the 3D visualization process. In this study, our goal is to compile these resources and provide an in-depth step by step technique on how 3D visualization may be achieved. This ranges from introducing marching cubes algorithm, the purpose of which is to extract the isosurface from the 3D data-set and the use of 3D mesh reconstruction by applying lighting, transparency and shading using open graphics library (OpenGL) application programming interface (API). Eventually, a graphical user interface (GUI) environment is implemented using fast light toolkit (FLTK). In addition to that, user interface such as rotation and zooming of the 3D model is shown to provide the basic needs in virtual reality environment. The source code is written in C++ language. Results are then demonstrated by showing the final snapshots of the application.