A Client/Server Framework for Interactive Remote 3D Visualization of Histological Data

The amount of data involved in medical volumes, especially in the case of volumes consisting of stacks of histological sections, tends to be very large. Despite rapid advancements in computer processing power and storage- and memory capacity in the past years these volumes are simply too large to be transferred to and visualized on regular workstations. At the same time Internet connectivity is becoming common and connections are getting faster every day. In this situation a client-server remote visualization can be used to hand off visualizations to (clusters of) dedicated, well-equipped, servers which can do the heavy work and send the result, or a part thereof, back to the client when ready. In this project we developed a client-server framework for remote visualization of histological data. The framework is designed to be scalable and effectively utilize hardware resources from multiple servers for each visualization pipeline. The framework uses the concept of strategies to assign resources to each visualization and to distribute these resources over the available hardware according to predefined rules. To manage the available data we designed a data scheme in which multiple objects belonging to a certain dataset, we will define these objects as modalities, can be stored in a relational database. A key feature of our solution is that the scheme allows appropriate visualizations of the modalities to be stored along with the data in the same relational database. Additionally, as part of this project, we developed a reference client application which is able to use the framework to do remote visualization. This application was purposely designed to work on many platforms without the need for state-of-the-art hardware or software. The application currently offers support for visualizations that require viewing of images, viewing of planes extracted from volumes and viewing of three-dimensional scenes under control by a camera. Both the framework and the reference client application are designed to be extensible and will be made available to the public domain so that the software can be used freely and adapted to future demands whenever needed.Mediamatics, Computer Graphics & CAD/CAMElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc