Ubiquitous medical volume rendering on mobile devices

While multimedia communications are widely adopted, sophisticated graphic rendering technologies are demanded for e-medical applications. In this study, a single-pass volume rendering algorithm is developed for WebGL platform which is emerging as a standard platform for interactive graphics applications on all the mobile devices. We exploit this platform for efficient rendering of volumetric datasets, especially 3D medical images. A remarkable advantage of this approach is that, being interfaced by the OpenGL ES 2.0 shading API, it can directly run on most embedded and mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. Technically, we propose a novel single-pass rendering pipeline, in contrast to the current WebGL volume rendering systems which use the multi-pass approach. The new pipeline can be implemented efficiently on the embedded GPU in the mobile device, enabling real-time visualization of high-resolution volumetric datasets. We also extend the pseudo-color shading by using custom transfer function widgets, which enables interactive feature enhancement in rendering. Extensive experimental results and performance assessments have been conducted, and a consistent 2x speedup against the current WebGL based volume rendering is achieved.