Exploring Brushlet Based 3D Textures in Transfer Function Specification for Direct Volume Rendering of Abdominal Organs

Intuitive and differentiating domains for transfer function (TF) specification for direct volume rendering is an important research area for producing informative and useful 3D images. One of the emerging branches of this research is the texture based transfer functions. Although several studies in two, three, and four dimensional image processing show the importance of using texture information, these studies generally focus on segmentation. However, TFs can also be built effectively using appropriate texture information. To accomplish this, methods should be developed to collect wide variety of shape, orientation, and texture of biological tissues and organs. In this study, volumetric data (i.e., domain of a TF) is enhanced using brushlet expansion, which represents both low and high frequency textured structures at different quadrants in transform domain. Three methods (i.e., expert based manual, atlas and machine learning based automatic) are proposed for selection of the quadrants. Non-linear manipulation of the complex brushlet coefficients is also used prior to the tiling of selected quadrants and reconstruction of the volume. Applications to abdominal data sets acquired with CT, MR, and PET show that the proposed volume enhancement effectively improves the quality of 3D rendering using well-known TF specification techniques.