Medical image processing tools for blender with HPC support

Abstract

We present a medical image processing plug-in in this paper. Our plug-in uses Blender’s environment and adds tools for the medical image processing and 3D model reconstructions and measurements. There are several software solutions to provide these tasks, two of which are used for comparison with our tool in this paper. However, there is not a single application that can perform medical image processing and subsequent 3D model reconstruction and post-processing with possible utilization of High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. In our plug-in we aim to use HPC resources to speed up the most computationally extensive tasks. The plug-in is written in Python and C++. The basic functionality and additional tools are implemented in Phyton. Blender has built-in Python interface, thus the development of the tools is quite fast. The C++ language is used for all time critical functions as it has unrestricted potential in parallel programming that can utilize available HPC resources. In the paper we present two examples, where we demonstrate possibilities of our Blender plug-in. We provide 3D reconstruction of human airway and human orbital floor and compare the results with those provided by 3D Slicer and Osirix.