home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Heart3d Documentation. June 10,1989
-
- Heart3d is copyright 1989 by Jon Harman. It is freely distributable as
- long as this documentation is included.
- This program is something of a curiosity. I work for a CT scanner
- manufacturer, Imatron. This scanner is the only commercial CT scanner
- capable of imaging the beating heart. I have written software for Imatron
- which can find the left ventricle outlines in our CT images and redraw the
- left ventricle as a wireframe 3D image. For fun I have ported the drawing
- routines to the Amiga. This is the background to the program heart3d. Run
- it from the CLI. It can read in a heart data file and then draw the left
- ventricle as a wireframe image from various viewpoints. It can even display
- a cine (ie a movie) of the beating heart.
- The original images were collected at 17 times a second. I can't draw
- them anywhere near as fast. I would appreciate any suggestions for speeding
- it up. One thing I have done is to save the bitmaps of the cine in ram
- (assuming there is enough available) and then just swap in the already drawn
- bitmaps. This speeds up a cine considerably. So if you have lots of ram
- the first time through a cine will be slow, but then it will speed up.
- I have included 6 heart data files with the program. They are:
- rest1.wal
- stress1.wal
- rest2.wal
- stress2.wal
- infarct1.wal
- infarct2.wal.
- Use the Load menu item to load the file or start the program with a file as
- argument, ie: heart3d rest1.wal.
- The rest/stress pairs show the same heart at rest and after either
- physical exercise or drug induced stress. Both are normal hearts. Note
- that you cannot tell the heart rate from the number of times in the cine.
- Usually only enough images are acquired to cover the heart cycle from the
- beginning of systole (contraction) to sometime after diastole (relaxed
- state) but before the beginning of systole again. This covers the most
- interesting parts of the heart cycle. Thus the rest and stress cines have
- the same number of times but the stress heart rate is much higher. It's
- interesting to see how the heart increases it's rate: by contracting
- somewhat faster but mainly by eliminating the resting time.
- For those of you with X-SPECS 3D glasses there is a version of heart3d
- which works with them. Write or call me for details.
- One reason for my writing this program was to learn how to use the Amiga
- Intuition interface. Thanks to Stuart Ferguson for the blk program and to
- Lars Thuring for his maker program. They make writing for the Amiga much
- less of a chore.
- If you would like more information on this program contact me at
- Imatron:
-
- Jon Harman
- Imatron Inc.
- 389 Oyster Point Blvd.
- South San Francisco, CA 94080
- (415)583-9964
-