Distributed under Creative Commons Attribution License

The rapid and flexible visualization of large amounts of complex data has become a crucial part in medical image analysis. In recent years the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) has evolved as the de-facto standard for open-source medical data visualization. It features a clean design based on a data flow paradigm, which the existing wrappers for VTK (Python, Tcl/Tk, Simulink) closely follow. This al-lows to elegantly model many types of algorithms, but presents a steep learning curve for beginners. In contrast to existing approaches we propose a framework for accessing VTK’s capabilities from within MATLAB, using a syntax which closely follows MATLAB’s graphics primitives. While providing users with the advanced, fast 3D visualization capabilities MATLAB does not provide, it is easy to learn while being flexible enough to allow for complex plots, large amounts of data and combinations of visualiza-tions. The proposed framework will be made available as open source with detailed documentation an