Introduction

In the following we will describe concept and realization of the MedicalExplorationToolkit--the METK. The METK was designed for loading, visualizing and exploring segmented medical data sets. It is a framework of several modules in http://www.mevislab.de/MeVisLab, a development environment for medical image processing and visualization.

http://www.mevislab.de/MeVisLab provides a lot of basic modules to load and process medical images as well as visualization modules to show segmented objects in 3d. Whole applications can be created based upon these modules connecting them to networks. Using only basics modules, these networks come up complex very fast. http://www.mevislab.de/MeVisLab provides so called macro modules, to bundle subnetworks. But for many tasks like loading a case or visualize some segmented objects, the user has to create his own macro modules. Hence, we created the METK as a framework with about 50 macro modules. Defining a common data and communication standard, all METK modules can be reused in different applications and new inventions are immediately usable for all users and developers.

The METK helps to develop basic applications very fast. It provides basic facilities like case management as well as advanced visualization techniques like stippling. The main tasks, the METK helps to solve, are:

1. Case Management: Load and save whole cases of segmented structures
   e.g. for surgery planning, educational training or intra operative visualization

2. Basic Visualization in 2D and 3D: Visualize segmented structures in multiple manner
   e.g. iso surface rendering, stippling, hatching, silhouettes, volume rendering, 2d overlays

3. Advanced Visualization: Provide advanced medical visualization techniques
   e.g. ghost views, cutaways, safety margins, labeling techniques, convolution surfaces

4. Animation: Interactive animations as well as pre-rendered videos
   Provide interactive animations of 3d scenes and facilities to render reusable videos.

5. User Interface: Widgets than can be used in medical applications
   e.g. tree views, automatic structure lists

6. Synchronization: Changes made in one part of an application should be communicate to all other parts
   Changing the visualization of a structure in 3D should have also effects in 2D. Or if an object is selected in 3D, the 2D viewer should jump to the corresponding slice.

7. State saving: The user ought to save different states of the visualization for later use.
   e.g. as a collection

In the following sections some basics of the METK and all METK modules are described.