[vtkusers] Animated Lung, general VTK questions

[Mackenzie L. Cowell]

Hi all -

I'm a summer intern at the arctic region supercomputing center in
Fairbanks, Alaska, and I'm working on a project to model human
respiration.  The goal of the project is to generate a 3D model of the
human lung from the Visible Human dataset, and to animate that lung in a
realistic way given certain airflow measurements taken from patients in a
hospital.

The project is just beginning, and after a little research, it's become
clear the VTK and ITK might be extremely useful tools for what we want to
do; thus, we were hoping to solicit you all for answers to a couple
general questions that will help define our project's direction over the
next few months.

1. None of us have used any kitware products before, but we're leaning
towards the use of the Insight Toolkit (ITK) for the generation of the
lung model.  Do any of you know how ITK is different from VTK, if and how
they work together, and which would be more appropriate for us to use in
the generation of the lung model?

2. Keeping in mind that we eventually want to be able to deform and
animate our model of the lung (in response to airflow data), what would be
an appropriate format for the model?  It seems like some representations
of points in space would lend themselves more easily to deformation and
whatnot then others - what do you think?

3. Originally, we were planning on rendering the lung in openGL, and
writing a C++ program to deform it somehow.  However, if VTK has the
capabilities to animate, we want to use them.  Would it be possible to use
VTK to manipulate the lung model to create the animation?


Thanks for taking the time to read this.  We really appreciate your
responses - each one of them is a small contribution to the success of our
project.

-thanks again,
Mac Cowell
ARSC summer intern