Oct. 11th, Friday - 13:30 - 14:00

My Journey from WebDev to Medical Visualization Rustacean

My partner and I became parents this year. When we learned that our son has a congenital heart defect I decided to do something to make his life better. This is when I remembered this one class about “Medical Visualization” and I decided to start my journey into this field using Rust (which I had previously learned).

In my talk I will quickly go through how I studied Rust as a total beginner yet experienced developer. I will present how volumetric medical data can be rendered in 3D. For this, I used a raycasting technique which I will show you the basics of. Then I will dive into my journey through graphical Rust crates (three-d, gl, glow, wgpu).

From the three-d crate I used the volume rendering example and extended it to be able to render DICOM files. Since I was not satisfied with the displayed result I went a level deeper and created my own volume renderer using raycasting. For this I started out with the gl crate. After making it work and being super proud I decided to switch to glow because of it being exposed by the three-d crate. Furthermore, I also ported this renderer to wgpu.

And finally I will present my result by giving you a live demo of a volume renderer that has camera and threshold controls and can switch between three different raycasting shaders.

Speaker

David Peherstorfer

David Peherstorfer is a Full Stack Web Developer and has been making web apps leveraging decoupled Drupal using React for about 10 years. For about one year he has been on a quest to go into the field of Medical Visualization to improve his son’s life in the long-run.

Originally he is from the mountainous region Vorarlberg in the west of Austria but he has spent about half of his life in the beautiful city of Vienna. He still enjoys a lot of different mountaineering (hiking, biking, climbing, trail running). He studied Computer Graphics at the university and is a self-taught Rustacean.

David Peherstorfer