Multi-parallel open technology to enable collaborative volume visualization: how to create global immersive virtual anatomy classrooms.

Many prototype projects aspire to develop a sustainable model of immersive radiological volume visualization for virtual anatomic education. Some have focused on distributed or parallel architectures. However, very few, if any others, have combined multi-location, multi-directional, multi-stream sharing of video, audio, desktop applications, and parallel stereo volume rendering, to converge on an open, globally scalable, and inexpensive collaborative architecture and implementation method for anatomic teaching using radiological volumes. We have focused our efforts on bringing this all together for several years. We outline here the technology we're making available to the open source community and a system implementation suggestion for how to create global immersive virtual anatomy classrooms. With the releases of Access Grid 3.1 and our parallel stereo volume rendering code, inexpensive globally scalable technology is available to enable collaborative volume visualization upon an award-winning framework. Based upon these technologies, immersive virtual anatomy classrooms that share educational or clinical principles can be constructed with the setup described with moderate technological expertise and global scalability.