CoWebViz: interactive collaborative sharing of 3D stereoscopic visualization among browsers with no added software

Vast amounts of multimodal imaging data are continuously generated in medicine. 3D and 3D stereoscopic visualization have become indispensable methods for health care professionals to effectively analyze and communicate this data in the clinical, research, and educational domains. The current visualization paradigm in health care confines 3D rendering to proprietary medical imaging workstations commonly housed in radiology departments or to tethered specialized clients (e.g. thick clients, Java, or plugins). We introduce a distributed visualization system whose client consists only of a current generation Internet web browser without downloaded software such as plugins or Java. Utilizing "Motion JPEG", our shared client application (CoWebViz) streams 3D and 3D stereoscopic images to one or more browsers while simultaneously enabling each browser to directly control the visualization, i.e., sharing all events with all participants. MedVolViz, our base visualization server, is an open-source, high-performance, parallel-processing medical volume rendering application designed to enable real-time interactive 3D stereoscopic visualizations. CoWebViz allows multiple participants to collaboratively view and remotely interact with MedVolViz via mouse and keyboard events in their browser. We comprehensively tested CoWebViz's stability and collaborative interactivity by deploying it as the core teaching technology for University of Chicago's Immersive Virtual Anatomy, an undergraduate biological sciences class which was audited in real-time by students and faculty at Cardiff School of Computer Science and Informatics. The client proved to be both intuitive and robust for all users across the unmodified open intercontinental Internet. We shall continue to refine CoWebViz to further improve performance and ease of use.