Development and future trends in the application of visualization toolkit (VTK): The case for medical image 3D reconstruction

Three-dimensional reconstruction of medical images plays a vital role in clinical medicine and medical research. It serves as a powerful tool to help doctors analyze multiple 2D medical images in a 3D perspective. The developed 3D model offers a faster and accurate approach in clinical diagnosis and therapy. Before, the development of 3D reconstruction programs it has always been a challenge to visualize in a 3D perspective but with the advent of powerful computing and graphics processing, medical imaging equipment development is on the rise. The advancement of 3D image reconstruction is not only due to the innovative hardware, but also because of the increase in open-source platforms or libraries, such as visualization toolkit (VTK), that assist on its development to provide an information visualization framework and advanced 3D modeling techniques. VTK is an object-oriented 3D graphics software program that is free to obtain and used both for open- and closed-source applications such as 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization. In medical imaging, data from ultrasound systems, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and computed tomography (CT) scans can be managed in VTK. Different algorithms of image processing such as color mapping, image re-slicing or resampling, iso-contouring, thresholding, and other algorithms can be utilized to make volume images from the data. Subsequently, data presentation is simplified with the data reconstruction through the use of supplemental software for analysis. VTK library contains a large number of filters, which are multi-threaded to facilitate parallel processing and interpretation. In this paper, recent technologies on the application of VTK for 3D reconstruction of biomedical images will be presented. Moreover, current methodologies will be discussed to clearly understand the different integral steps needed in image data conversion.