Visible Human in real-time using GLSL to emulate Volumetrics

Kai Kostack

In this demonstration you are about to see a little (10 minutes) tour through a real female human body (age 59) from the Visual Human Project. Everything is real-time recorded.

The shown "block" consists of 1746 x 570 x 666 cells in resolution. It's a plain stack of hundreds of planes each mapped with slice of the dataset. i have written a script to fully automate the process of conversion. It is rendered by a basic GeForce 8600 GT with 512 MB of video memory on top of a 2,4 GHz Quad-Core system with 4 GB of memory.

Highly sensitive people should be aware that this video shows a cadaver and nudity before they click one of the following links.

Vimeo-Link

YouTube-Link

Download H.264/AVI original in HD 1280x700 (70 MB)

afecelis

Impressive! Then blender could also be used for medical real time visualization if hooked up onto the proper gadget? Or this is all done after modeling and including the different info layers?

Meta-Androcto

Awesome work.
I remember reading about this technique or the possibility of it some time ago.
It's strangely both disturbing & compelling at the same time.

Congrats.

TheANIMAL

There is something very, very strange about watching something like that.

Great script!

bupla

As I said you on Vimeo, its awesome. I have dreamt several month to have this kind of possibility with DICOM files, Osirix (a medical 3D viewer) and the volumetric branch of Blender. Can you give us more details please?

stvndysn

blender breaking ground in medical science YAY,

that is truly fantantastic work, and congrats

FreakyDude

Holy shit! That looks impressive.

isigrim

Very impressive. Thanks for showing this.
Do you plan to publish this script and the volume-data? i do some medical work in blender and would really appreciate having something like this as reference material.

popski

Oh dear, that's really amazing!!! Are this really so called Voxels or something? I've seen this only in some medicine scientific movies produced with some ultra advanced computed tomography (CT) machines. But this looks even better for some reason!?! What the hack is this script!? Please tell us more about!

Bliz

That is really interesting.
I'm curious how you got the 3D effect in (as an example) the chest cavity, where the lungs should be? Do the slices have transparency/emptiness information embedded in them? I thought they were pure flat bed scans?

Also, how did you get the dataset? Are you connected to a university? Last time I looked you had to be connected to a medical educational establishment before they'd give you the dataset. I'd love to have it just for modelling an accurate skeleton.

3pointEdit

Kai, that's just amazing. Do you have to be dead to get a scan? Is it MRI data? Sorry for dumbness of questions?

AD-Edge

That... is... incredible...

Medical cooperations could really use something like this. Ive seen some of their 3D imaging stuff on tv, and its nothing like this, especially not in proper colours etc like that. Amazing.

roofoo

The human body is an amazing thing.

ecgilboy

This is absolutely incredible....good job....

Kai Kostack

@Bliz:
I had the dataset lying around on a harddisk for many years as a few thousands of high quality jpeg files for space reasons. I'm not sure when or where I downloaded it, I think it was even before 2002. At this time there was no real use of it for 3D simulations, because of the weak computers. I can remember when I did a first small test with blender in 2005 or so, when I tried to render a downscaled dataset with only 512 MB of ram, it was so slooow. :/ And now with all the GLSL possibilities in blender, it's just amazing how nice and smooth it works only with a standard graphics card. I still can crash the software with to much data, but I didn't even use a todays high-end system.

As an alternative you can try to search for other datasets.
I know of a few Visible Human Datasets from the Chinese. But they are ugly watermarked, not nice to use. There is also Korean Visible Human but I couldn't even found a download location for this, only a pretty useless web-navigator which only shows images with 300 pixels width.

@3pointEdit:
From Wiki: The female cadaver was encased and frozen in a gelatin and water mixture in order to stabilize the specimen for cutting. The specimen was then “cut” in the axial plane at .33 millimeter intervals, resulting in some 40 gigabytes of data. The process of grinding the surface away is entirely destructive to the specimen and leaves no usable or preservable “slice” of the cadaver.

So yes, you better be dead to get a scan.

Some "Making of" of the procedure:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYKd--QI4uU

Visible_Human_Chinese-Serial_sectioning_and_photographing.mpeg (right click, save as)

Teo_GreenGage

looks great, would it be possible to record that and create a proper fly animation with no lag? that would be neat.

I hope that you find more raw data to work with.

FreakyDude

Quote:

Originally Posted by roofoo

The human body is an amazing thing.

it most certainly is...

ristesekuloski

Kai, this is an amazing resource! Oh how I wish I had this when I was studying anatomy!
(I am MD, and believe me, this would make learning anatomy much easier)

I thin that this could be really great way to promote blender within the medical profession (Somebody should tell Ton about this)

And there are unbelievable commercial possibilities!

Just my 2 c.

okchoir

My congratulations to you as well. This is a big surprise capability.

Now, for your next demo: stereo imaging. :-)

Gillan

geniale!!!

you can use the "alt b" clipping border, to "cut" the body in arbitrary direction, not only the z direction of the camera.

sorry for my english