Medical Visualization from Hospital in Kupang City Based on Visualization Toolkits

Abstract

Medical visualization requires interdisciplinary groups of researchers to analyze and explore medical data. Visualizing medical data can use open-source visualization software to avoid administration effort in medical visualization collaboration works. Visualization Toolkits (VTK) is a free, open source for medical visualization. VTK has been used to reconstruct medical images. However, few studies have used VTK to visualize DICOM data from Computed Tomography (CT) scan images using local hospital data in Indonesia. This study aims to reconstruct DICOM data from CT scan of the local hospital in Kupang city, Province Nusa Tenggara Timur, Indonesia. We used VTK to visualize the CT scan images of the head, thorax, and abdomen into two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) images. The DICOM data was visualized first in 2D, and then it was reconstructed into 3D using ray casting and volume rendering algorithm on VTK 8.2. The VTK was built on C++ and Visual Studio 2017. We have successfully demonstrated VTK to visualize 2D and 3D CT scan data from the local hospital in Kupang city. In the future, VTK has the potential to be used by a group of researchers using local hospital data in Indonesia to visualize 2D and 3D CT scan images.