Interactive segmentation and visualization of large volume datasets using graphics hardware-based level set method

This paper presents an efficient graphics hardware-based method to segment and visualize level-set surfaces as interactive rates. Our method is composed of page manager, level-set solver, and volume renderer. The page manager which performs in CPU generates page table, inverse page table and available page stack as well as processes the activation and inactivation of pages. The level-set solver computes only voxels near the iso-surface. To run efficiently on GPUs, volume is decomposed into a set of small pages. Only those pages with non-zero derivatives are stored on GPU. These active pages are packed into a large 2D texture memory. The level-set partial differential equation (PDE) is computed directly on this packed format. The page manager is used to help managing the packing of the active data. The volume renderer performs volume rendering of the original data simultaneously with the evolving level set in GPU. Experimental results using two chest CT datasets show that our graphics hardware-based level-set method is much faster than software-based one.