SMIS - a real-time stereoscopic medical imaging system

In this paper, we present an X-ray radiography system which can provide intra-operative stereo imaging of the patient's operational area during a spinal surgery. We use two horizontally separated X-ray tubes and a flat-panel X-ray detector mounted on two ends of a C-arm microcontroller synchronizes the image acquisition, and the left and right images are grabbed into the system alternately. Surgeons can have a 3D perception of the spine's X-ray image in real-time. We further developed a whole image processing language called PPL. PPL takes images as operands instead of dealing with complex pixel operation. To speed up the rendering speed in a network environment, we proposed a level of detail (LOD) with reverse prediction method that can fast transmit images over Internet in real-time.