Texture-based Volume Visualization for Multiple Users on the World Wide Web

Abstract

We present a texture-based volume visualization tool, which permits remote access to radiological data and supports multi-user environments. The application uses JAVA and the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), thus it is platform-independent and able to use fast 3D graphics acceleration hardware of client machines. The application allows the shared viewing and manipulation of three-dimensional medical volume datasets in a heterogeneous network. Volume datasets are transferred from a server to different client machines and locally visualized using a JAVA-enabled web-browser. In order to reduce network traffic, a data reduction and compression scheme is proposed. The application allows view dependent and orthogonal clipping planes, which can be moved interactively. On the client side, the users are able to join a visualization session and to get the same view onto the volume dataset by synchronizing the viewpoint and any other visualization parameter. Interesting parts of the dataset are marked for other users by placing a tag into the visualization. In order to support collaborative work users communicate with a chat applet, which we provide, or by using any existing video conferencing tool.