The primary goal of VolSuite is to provide users in medical, engineering and other scientific fields with a variety of scientific data processing, analysis and visualization tools. It is flexible enough to integrate user-specific modules (aka plugins) and promotes intuitive user-driven behavior. Some of VolSuite's specific (and unique!) features are:

• It's free!
• Available on Linux/Unix/Win32. OSX port is in progress
• Supports arbitrary types of scientific data (e.g. volumes, molecules, etc) - someone just needs to write a plugin!
• Built-in "session management" for saving works in progress or easily sharing/exchanging sessions
• Built-in networking capabilities for remote synchronization or database access
• Built-in user tracing to record/playback events and output frames for making movies/animations
• VolSuite Document files and VolSuite Data Object files can load/save data types transparently
• Reasonably straightforward developer API, including the use of an open-source, object-oriented GUI toolkit (fltk)
• Basic GL DataViewer module, and modules for clipping planes, transfer functions, video streaming and more!

VolSuite is designed to be extensible. Developers have the ability to extend the VolSuite framework by implementing their own new features for specialized tasks or integrating proprietary techniques. VolSuite offers a number of features to aid developers:

• Dynamically loadable modules (a.k.a. plugins) to maximize feature set flexibility
• High-level abstraction of core classes with emphasis on polymorphism
• Generic DataObject class that can be used to create arbitrary types of data
• Virtually limitless extensibility for integrating algorithms for loading, saving, visualization, analysis, and modifcation

Some developer documentation is available, but the developer walkthrough pages are still forthcoming. Please contact me if you want to develop a module and are having trouble.

The RegularVolume Package

This is currently the only module package available for VolSuite. It is distributed with the current version of VolSuite and is designed to work with regular, three-dimensional, rectilinear volumetric grids of data (hence the name "RegularVolume"), such as MRI, CT, or various areas of computational physics. Here is a list of some of the capabilities of modules included in the RegularVolume package:

• OpenGL-based accelerated direct rendering of volumetric data
• Read support for PNG, TIFF, JPEG, DICOM (uncompressed), SGI, PNM, XPM and RAW images, and write support for PNG, TIFF, JPEG, SGI, PNM and RAW images.
• Almost all modules support VolSuite's Session Management and Serialization API's for remote synchronization and user tracing
• Modules for manipulating volumes including: resampling, converting, cropping, and transforming
• and much more!

Coming Soon! The following features are planned for future releases of VolSuite:

• Isosurface rendering module
• Splatting rendering module
• Ray-tracing rendering module
• Multi-pass volume rendering
• Molecular dynamics
• Vector field visualization module
• Batch volume processing
• Real-time CSG for volumes
• Arbitrary meta-data storage within volumes and documents (e.g. annotations, voice notes, URL's, movies, image stills, etc)