System and method for fast texture-based tensor field visualization for DT-MRI

摘要

A method for visualizing diffusion-tensor magnetic resonance images, including the steps of providing a diffusion-tensor magnetic resonance image (DT-MRI) volume, positioning and orienting a virtual camera for rendering the volume, the camera having an image plane, the camera's orientation being defined by its look, right and up vectors, associating a billboard with each voxel, each the billboard being parallel with the image plane of the camera, where the look, right and up vectors are used to orient each the billboard, applying a texture to each billboard, each the texture being transformed by the inverse of the diffusion tensor associated with the voxel to which the billboard is associated, and rendering the volume by rendering each visible billboard in the image volume, where a 2-dimensional (2D) visualization of the DT-MRI is produced.