A Framework for Web-Based Interactive Applications of High-Resolution 3D Medical Image Data

With the advances in medical imaging devices, large volumes of high-resolution 3D medical image data have been produced. These high-resolution 3D data are very large in size, and severely stress storage systems and networks. Most existing Web-based 3D medical image interactive applications therefore deal with only low- or medium-resolution image data. While it is possible to download the whole 3D high-resolution image data from the server and perform the image visualization and analysis at the client site, such an alternative is infeasible when the high-resolution data are very huge, and many users concurrently access the server. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for Web-based interactive applications of high-resolution 3D medical image data. Specifically, we first partition the whole 3D data into buckets, and then compress each bucket separately. We also propose an indexing structure for these buckets to efficiently support typical queries such as 3D slicer and region of interest (ROI), and only the relevant buckets are transmitted instead of the whole high-resolution 3D medical image data. Furthermore, in order to better support concurrent accesses and to improve the average response time, we also propose some techniques for bucket group access on the server side and incremental transmission. Our experimental study based on a human brain MRI data set indicates that the proposed framework can significantly reduce storage and communication requirements, and can enable real-time interaction with remote high-resolution 3D medical image data for many concurrent users