4D Real-Time Cardiac MDCT Image Volume Rendering Method Research Based on GPU Texture Mapping

A low-injury, high success rate, and no side effects treatment for curing heart physical defects is urgently needed in the medical field. Although with electrocardiographically (ECG) gated technology, the timeline information of heartbeat can be collected by Multi-detector Computed Tomography (MDCT), the traditional CPU-based volume rendering methods can not meet the dynamic cardiac real-time reconstruction. This paper presents a GPU texture mapping based dynamic cardiac 4D real time rendering method. It uses ECG-gated MDCT acquiring cardiac real-time volume data sets, each of which called one time-phased data and mapped to a GPU texture unit. The material and lighting properties, color and opacity data, computed by GPU, are also mapped to other two texture units. Then through the fragment programs, these textures are looked up, and the result pixel color is received. Volume textures switch are controlled by the time interval from ECG-gated 4D real-time cardiac data acquisition. Experimental results show that the method we presented can achieve a dynamic cardiac real-time rendering; quality is better, and speed faster enough to meet clinical needs.