The authors present a method to interconnect the Visualisation Toolkit (VTK) and Unity. This integration enables them to exploit the visualisation capabilities of VTK with Unity's widespread support of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality displays, and interaction and manipulation devices, for the development of medical image applications for virtual environments. The proposed method utilises OpenGL context sharing between Unity and VTK to render VTK objects into the Unity scene via a Unity native plugin. The proposed method is demonstrated in a simple Unity application that performs VTK volume rendering to display thoracic computed tomography and cardiac magnetic resonance images. Quantitative measurements of the achieved frame rates show that this approach provides over 90 fps using standard hardware, which is suitable for current augmented reality/virtual reality display devices.
Keywords: 3D medical imaging data; OpenGL context; Unity native plugin; Unity scene; Unity widespread support; VTK objects; VTK volume rendering; augmented reality; augmented reality displays; cardiac magnetic resonance images; computerised tomography; current augmented reality/virtual reality display devices; data visualisation; interaction devices; manipulation devices; medical image applications; medical image processing; mixed reality displays; rendering (computer graphics); simple Unity application; thoracic computed tomography; time 3.0 d; virtual environments; virtual reality displays; visualisation capabilities; visualisation toolkit.