A Virtual Reality System for Medical Imaging

In recent years significant advances in the field of Immersive Medical Imaging Analysis have made it essential to many disciplines related to medicine, such as radiology, neurology, cardiology, radiotherapy. Starting from three dimensional (3D) image datasets produced by computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, for these areas it can be very useful to use simulated visualizations of human organs. By viewing the inside of anatomical structures and interacting with them, doctors can better understand the data of interest for medical training, surgical simulations, examination and diagnosis aims.In this paper we present a virtual reality system, that involves new software components based on top of opensource and cross-platform libraries; it consists of a set of services implementing immersive 3D navigation and interaction of virtual representations of human organ structures, starting from DICOM data. These features have been developed to be integrated into a medical imaging component-based architecture, which at present is under development.