Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

17 Sep 2001

Mac3D: More info on Medical 3D for the Macintosh

A story published over a week ago has triggered reader emails regarding various medical 3D and CAD software questions and answers for the Macintosh medical user. Here is another reader's solutions to the original problem:

Gentle Persons,

I just read the questions regarding medical 3D published on your website. The solution to the described problems are simple (if I get the problem right). "Out of the box" one can use "NIH-Image" (http://rsb.info.nih.gov/nih-image/download.html) or one of it's spin-offs e.g. "object-image" (http://simon.bio.uva.nl/). There is even a Java-Version ImageJ (which runs nicely under MacOS X 10.0.4). All programs allow you to load in different images automatically, compose them in a stack, make 3D-cuts, rotations, or, which is closely related to the described problem, the detection of "particles". In this case by simply applying an appropriate threshold on the colour palette of the images, the borders of particles are detected, and various information can be selected for automatically calculation (for example the area inside the detected border) and finally exported to ASCII-files. Oh, before I forgot: and all programs are available for free.

Besides ImageJ there is a shareware program called Carnoy (find it via www.versiontracker.com) which seems to do similar tricks. Feel free to supply my email address directly to Mr. Frich for further information.

Markus Bongard

Universidad Miguel Hernandez

Facultad Medicina

There you have it. These sound like direct solutions to the original problem. If you have any suggestions on Medical 3D software please share them with all of us.

Much appreciation to Markus