Plug-In 3D Viewer based on XIP
Volume Rendering in Slicer using XIP
Key Investigators
- Siemens Corporate Research: Lining Yang, Melanie Grebe
- Steve Pieper
Our Objective
Our objective is to create a new 3D Slicer Plug-in based on NCI's eXtensible Imaging Platform (XIP), which can then be used as a starting point for future projects involving NA-MIC and caBIG.
Our Approach and Plan
We will implement a Host/Plug-in interface API that leverages the use of XIP modules (based on Open Inventor), and as a first example we will implement a simple 3D Viewer that can load and display DICOM data and visualize/navigate it using 3 synchronized MPR windows and a 3D volume rendering window, with the ability to render fused MR brain data.
Our Progress
We implemented a prototype that directly embedded the XIP in the existing Volume Rendering Module of the 3D Slicer where we take the output volume and other parameters from Slicer/VTK and use them to build and render an XIP scenegraph using XIP's volume rendering nodes.
Future work: During the week we talked to Ron, Steve, Jim and many others to explore other ways of integrating the XIP and 3D Slicer. Among them are: (1) Uses the socket connection / Slicer Daemon to establish a host/plug-in architecture where we can leverage the strength of both the XIP/slicer world. One example is that XIP serves as a Dicom explorer host and slicer as a post-processing plugin. (2) Uses XIP to help the users to further process / perform visual programming of for example the slicer command line module results.
