
Cinematic rendering – an alternative to volume rendering for 3D CT (2016) - xo5vik
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5110476/#
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manol74
It's not an alternative to volume rendering as the title suggests. It's a kind
of a brand name the manufacturer wants to establish for their admittedly very
impressive volume rendering implementation

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xo5vik
Fair enough - it's an alternative implementation of volume rendering. How
about: "exposure rendering - an alternative to ray-casting"?

Ref'd in the submission - Kroes T, Post FH, Botha CP. Exposure render: an
interactive photo-realistic volume rendering framework. PLoS One.
2012;7(7):e38586. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0038586.
([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3388083/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3388083/))

Generously there is also code available (last commit 2013), although I haven't
tried it yet... [https://code.google.com/archive/p/exposure-
render/](https://code.google.com/archive/p/exposure-render/)

I was curious about any overlap with an earlier post today "How Voxels Became
‘The Next Big Thing’"
[[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17169209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17169209)]

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CyberDildonics
It seems like these guys added lighting to the visualization of CT volumes and
decided to call it "Cinematic Rendering" or "CR" for short.

I'm not sure what possessed these people to take 40 year old techniques and
decide that they could come up with a hyperbolic name and a new acronym then
not have everyone just roll their eyes.

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John_KZ
Welcome to the field of medical technologies.

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riahi
Are there any physicians on here that find these renders useful? As a
radiology resident, I often prefer reading from the source images, as the
whole point is to see inside a patient, rather than provide some partial
surface rendering.

Non-radiologists seem to love these sorts of images, but I don't think they
are all that helpful.

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VladTheImplier
They are where form and contour matters, which you can't always deduce from a
orthographic 3 Panel view. In my current case the form and thickness variation
of nerves in Parkinson's patients is looked at and analyzed. Since nerve curve
through space like worms, looking at curvature in raw image data is
unpractical, especially since it's not always apparent whether you look at the
cross section at an angle.

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riahi
I’m not sure if it’s a language issue or a research vs clinical practice
issue, but this sounds like something that diffusion tensor imaging would used
for with special analysis packages for analyzing the volume and spatial
relationships of neurons.

The software shown is for CT data, which is abysmal for evaluating white
matter bundles. Any links to your research? Always useful to learn about other
applications of imaging.

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VladTheImplier
This is very interesting, the amount of rendering complexity they pull from
volume data is nothing short of impressive. Having never ventured beyond
Orthogonal projections for pseudo 3D in my work, this is some fresh air. But
it's rather useless as a standalone technology. Much of the appeal comes from
pulling color and using it to render from segmented volume data, which is
rarely the case in the field. "Scattering effects are modelled using a local
gradient shading model" This can mess with perception, if done incorrectly,
especially where precision is spares like Volumetric data pulled from
Ultrasound, not to mention such a rendering model in non segmented data sets
is questionable. But one hell of a tool to convince a board meeting of
whatever.

