Portable and Interoperable Views of Medical Image Data with ISO Extensible 3D (X3D) Opportunities Whitepaper

The Extensible 3D scene graph, X3D (ISO/IEC 19775), provides an expressive and durable platform to build interactive rich-media 3D visualizations. Working above any specific rendering library, X3D provides a powerful set of abstractions to compose meshes, appearances, lighting, animations, viewpoints, navigations and interactions. From laptops to immersive VR installations to mobile devices, X3D delivers interoperable 3D at web enterprise scale. The newest revision of X3D: version 3.3 (2012) includes new components and functionality for reproducible, platform-independent volume rendering. From its original US TATRC-funded project for advanced medical visualization functionality and medical data exchange, the Web3D Consortium’s Medical Working Group (MWG) has specified and demonstrated cross-platform volume rendering styles (i.e., transfer functions), segmentation and ontology integration (e.g. SNOMED). From clinical DICOM scans and reviews of patients to advanced microscopy and 500 million year old fossils, the VolumeData and VolumeRenderStyle nodes of X3D 3.3 provide an expressive, open and royalty-free basis to reproduce rich cross-platform visualizations. With the technological foundations in place for web-enabled presentations of both polygonal, volume and meta data, it is now time to activate these new extensions and value chains for the healthcare and research enterprise. We propose a two-pronged program to leverage this prior work into new workflows as well a