IMEX: A Tool For Image Display And Contour Management In A Windowing Environment

Medical workstations of the future will support the real-time display and interactive manipulation of 3-D objects derived from CT, MRI and other imaging modalities. As part of such an integrated system for visualizing 3-D volumes, we have developed an highly interactive, flexible, and portable program for the 2D display of image slices and contours outlining anatomical objects. The editing of these contours as well as their automatic creation by thresholding and edge-tracking is supported. The contours may later be used to generate 3D surfaces for shaded-graphics rendering, or to mask out regions of interest in the image for volume rendering. This "image executive" program, or Imex, is designed to run in a windowing environment (i.e., the X Window System). The user-interface model, which may be described as a "Macintosh 1 for images", associates one movable and resizable window with each displayed view of a 2D image slice or of an indexed array of slices. Any number of views into one slice or into a subset of an array of slices may be present. Natural interaction is achieved by providing immediate response and by using the mouse to effect navigation and viewing functions, for example grabbing and dragging a slice onto another to copy its field-of-view or other attributes.

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