Design and Implementation of a Volumetric Merging Tool

Abstract

The study of the human brain is one of the biggest research challenges nowadays. Thanks to the impressive improvement in technology, great advances are being achieved in the study of the microanatomical structures of the neurons, which are the main nervous system processing cells. The study of those structures requires to capture high-resolution images. In such cases, due to the resolution required, processing of complete neurons is unfeasible. The purpose of this project is to provide the neuroscientists with a tool that allows them to visualize and reconstruct complete neurons from multiple high-resolution sections. To this end, we developed a tool capable of loading different volumetric data sets and merging them into a new volume. A rendering engine was designed to support several volumetric rendering modes. The graphical user interface allows the user to interact with the volumes in intuitive way and facilitates volume stitching task. Furthermore, the implementation makes use of GPU to improve the application.