Interactive manipulation of three-dimensional images

Abstract

This thesis is about the design and implementation of an application for editing voxel data. We are primarily working with MRI and CT data in a medical setting, but neither the application nor the problem itself is specific to this field. Most, but not all, of the functionality is geared toward segmented datasets. In addition to being usable as an application in itself, our program should provide a prototyping framework for others who want to test algorithms and tools on three-dimensional datasets. Because of this, we have designed and documented a plugin API, and implemented a number of plugins performing different operations on the dataset.

The thesis touches on a lot of problems and choices that were made while implementing the application, from the overall application design down to our choice of libraries and tools. The programming language is C++. We made a choice to rely on libraries where we could, and so we make use of Blitz++, ImageMagick, Autotools, Qt, OpenGL and Open Inventor.

The finished application's capabilities are outlined, and the design, tool choices and usability of the application are discussed.