Evaluation of a bricked volume layout for a medical workstation based on Java

Abstract

Volumes acquired for medical examination purposes are constantly increasing in size. For this reason, the computer’s memory is the limiting factor for visualizing the data. Bricking is a well-known concept used for rendering large data sets. The volume data is subdivided into smaller blocks to achieve better memory utilization. Until now, the vast majority of medical workstations use a linear volume layout. We implemented a bricked volume layout for such a workstation based on Java as required by our collaborative company partner to evaluate different common access patterns to the volume data. For rendering, we were mainly interested to see how the performance will differ from the traditional linear volume layout if we generate images of arbitrarily oriented slices via Multi-Planar Reformatting (MPR). Furthermore, we tested access patterns which are crucial for segmentation issues like a random access to data values and a simulated region growing. Our goal was to find out if it makes sense to change the volume layout of a medical workstation to benefit from bricking. We were also interested to identify the tasks where problems might occur if bricking is applied. Overall, our results show that it is feasible to use a bricked volume layout in the stringent context of a medical workstation implemented in Java.