Real time exploration and management of large medical volumetric datasets on small mobile devices—Evaluation of remote volume rendering approach

•System for real time exploration and management of volumetric dataset is presented.•System uses mobile devices with programmable GPUs as the remote interfaces.•The prototype of system is capable to remotely render data with frequency 30 fps.•System performance was evaluated on dataset with size 5123 voxels.

In this paper I present the architecture of system that can be used for real time exploration and management of large medical volumetric datasets. The new state of the art solution presented in this paper is an example of visual data management system. System prototype evaluation proved that it is possible to use low-powered (and cheap) up-to-date mobile devices with programmable GPUs as the remote interfaces for exploration of large volumetric medical data. The implementation was done with high-level programming language that enables portability between different hardware models. The lack of lossy compression enables to display high quality medical images visualizations without any simplifications and noises in frequency domain. The prototype of system is capable to remotely render and send to a client (for example cell phone or tablet) rendered data with frequency 30 fps with limited resolution during interaction. One second after the interaction is finished client machine receives full resolution image. The evaluation of the system was performed on volumetric computed tomography angiography image with approximate size 5123 voxels.