VoluMedic-OG VoluMedic

VoluMedic offers blazingly fast software volume rendering in highest and to date unseen quality as well as real-time hardware volume rendering for previewing and interactive workflow. In addition to this VoluMedic offers hundreds of functions for import and processing of volumetric data as well as tools to create geometry from volumetric objects. All this combined with LightWave`s own extensive toolset will allow you to see your volumetric datasets in a whole new light (and that literally).

VoluMedic, the next generation of the award winning software for the editing, viewing, rendering and analysis of volume data.

NEW Features in VoluMedic 3.5 Include:

NEW Features in VoluMedic 3.0 Include:

• GPU accelerated raycasting in LightWave's Viewports.

• Among the many improvements in VoluMedic 3.0, is a completely rewritten OpenGL volume renderer that leverages the full power of the GPU for previewing volumetric objects inside LightWave's Viewports.

• New, streamlined user interface.

• Slice views are now available inside LightWave's viewports, replacing the Slice Editor panel (which is still available). The volume data is displayed and resliced according to three relative coordinate systems (dataset, object and world).

• Painting, measurement and segmentation of volume data can now be done directly in the LightWave viewports (3D and 2D views).

• Tools for automatic, semi- automatic and manual pre- orientation of volume data. This is particularly important if data always has to be aligned the same way for reliable measurement and analysis. Reoriented data is correctly resliced and displayed in real-time in the 2D and 3D Views.

• Eight new Shading Quality modes for the software renderer that do not only look better, but also render much faster than those available in version 2.0. The same Shading Quality levels also affect the new GPU- Raycaster, making a manual selection of shaders unnecessary.

• New requesters for the reduction of dataset and OpenGL texture sizes make very large datasets viewable even on systems with otherwise insufficient memory (at a slightly reduced quality).

• Improved support for the interactive ViewPort Renderer (VPR) in LightWave 10 and later. Switch between GPU and CPU rendering at any time! Use whatever fits your workflow and your hardware!

• Faster, multithreaded filters and importers.

• New compressed VoluMedic format for more efficient storage, as well as faster loading and saving.

• Improved Analyze and DICOM- Importers.

NEW features in VoluMedic 2.0 include:

• Measurement Tools: Measure volumes, distances and angles. Store the results in a Sqlite database and export them into a customizable CSV- table- file. CSV files are widely supported by applications such as Microsoft Office and the Open Office suite.
• New Segmentation Tools, Selection Masks: In addition to our patented Volume Painting tools, VoluMedic now also supports segmentation via a 3d Magic Wand' like tool. Click on any voxel and select surrounding voxels of the same or similar Density. The resulting Masks' can be used as 3d- Alpha Maps or Clip Maps for volume rendering as well as VoluMedics Surface Mesh Creation tools. They can also be used for measurement. Like any other data set, Masks can be edited with all the other editing tools available in VoluMedic. Masks can be painted and filtered. Like VoluMedic's Volume Painting tools, the selection tools have a non linear Undo History.
• Filters: VoluMedic 2.0 includes a couple of powerful, new preprocessing filters. The new Gaussian and Median Filters help cleaning up noisy data sets. They also help with softening the transitions in the new Selection Masks. The filters are also tied into VoluMedic's non linear Undo History.
• VoluMedic Wizard: The new VoluMedic Wizard makes creation of VoluMedic projects easier than ever before. Let the Wizard take you from a DICOM file to a finished Animation in a just a few easy steps.
• Hounsfield Support: VoluMedic now supports Hounsfield Units. Support for Hounsfield Units allowed the VoluMedic team to implement presets that are valid for most DICOM- CT data. You will find the new Presets in the Wizard and the Slice Editor.
• Improved Import: The Importer has, once again, been improved. Besides the new support for Hounsfield Units, data sets can now be imported in a much more memory efficient fashion. Particularly multi channel datasets can benefit from this. Users can also manually reduce the precision of the imported data, to further conserve system memory. The DICOM importer also has seen another update, providing better compatibility with certain vendors.
• Improvements in Scalar Panel: The Scalar Panel has seen some fine tuning and cleanups. A new popup has been added to house a Selection Mask for rendering.Shading Softness can now be controlled via a percentage slider instead of a simple two value popup. Inverted' Opacity Ramps no longer require the use of Use Opacity for Normals'. This not only makes renderings look much better, it also allowed for the now obsolete option to be removed. New renderer optimizations made the Preprocessing' optimization obsolete and this control has been removed as well.
• Other Improvements: DICOM information can optionally be anonymized' when it is saved into a VoluMedic file. Painting information is no longer lost when the Slice Editor is closed. The Histogram is now in a Panel of its own. This improved the refresh rates in the Slice Editor. There are new scripts for the creation of Bounding Boxes and the Bounding Box Panel to the main UI. Another new script quickly creates a simple gradient backdrop.

NEW features in VoluMedic 1.5 include:

• New and improved Importer : DICOM file support has been improved and more vendor specific DICOMfilevariations are now correctly recognized by the importer. A new panel opens if the selected DICOM file is in a folder, that contains more than one series of DICOM files. This panel shows all possible series defined by Patient Name, Study-ID, Series Description, Series Number, the Convolution Kernel, as well as the Number of Slices for each series.
• DICOMDIR file support : If a DICOM series is accompanied by a DICOMDIR file, this file can now be selected for import (instead of a DICOM file). A new panel will open allowing the user to select one of the series defined by the DICOMDIR file. This is now the recommended method for importing DICOM files into VoluMedic.
• RAW file import has been improved . It is now possible to import RAW files that contain more than one slice in a single file.
• There are more options for bit depth and bit order . Many otherwise unrecognized file formats can also be imported by specifying the header size.
• New options for how to treat the individual channels (e.g. to read RGBA as RGBA, or RGB, or just A, etc) help with managing the memory requirements of volumetric data.
• New DICOM Info panel : Extra information (study and patient information) that was imported from DICOM files is now stored in VoluMedic's native file format and can be viewed in this new panel, which can be accessed from the VoluMedic Editor panel.
• Volume Painting (patents pending):This is a new and very comfortable way for the manual segmentation of complex areas in a dataset. Just paint into the volume with three dimensional brushes. Lots of options and a fully editable paint history make this a very powerful tool currently not available in any other volumetric viz application. View flash presentation of Volume Painting Feature.
• Geometry to Volume Render Modes: These two new render modes in the Scalar Panel allow to render geometry into new or existing volumetric datasets.
• New Bounding Box panel : This new panel can be accessed through the Object Properties of the Bounding Box object. There are new settings that allow to assign a bounding Box to a different Scalar Object or to change the Bounding Box shape. Two new shapes are available (besides the 'old' Box Shape) 'Sphere' and 'Cylinder'.
• 64 Bit version: The size of datasets is now only limited by the amount of available system RAM.

Users familiar with the realities of volume rendering know that real- life datasets are rarely in ideal high resolution. To guarantee an ideal image even with lower res datasets VoluMedic offers different interpolation methods that help create clear shapes in situations where other imaging solutions fail.

Object settings 

• Rendermodes: (Volume, Solid and Xray)
• Interpolation (Nearest, Linear, Bicubic2/4 and BSpline).
• Color and Opacity Gradients
• Luminosity (self illumination)
• Diffuse Illumination
• Specularity
• Glossiness
• Color Highlights
• Shading softness
• Sampling Distance
• Shading quality and much more

• Render imagesequences or videos into any of the supported I/OImage formats.
• Volumetric objects can be rendered together with polygon geometry.
• Network rendering with unlimited rendernodes. Make sure to check our Gallery for images and videos showing VoluMedic`s software rendering in action.

Real-time OpenGL Hardware Volume Rendering
In addition to software rendering VoluMedic offers real-time OpenGL hardware volume rendering in LightWave`s viewports for previewing and scene setup. Users can create additional GLSL- shaders to change the look of the OpenGL- preview. Like VoluMedic`s software rendering, the hardware rendering has support for Antialising, Depth of Field and Motionblur (via hotkey). OpenGL hardware rendering 

Surface object creation
VoluMedic allows to create polygonobjects from volumetric objects. These can later be manipulated in LigtWave`s Modeler and/or exported to other applications such as e.g. CAD Applications or WRML or Shockwave 3D files. Please check the gallery section for a VRML file demonstrating a possible application of this feature.