WEM - General Information

The approach of the WEM (Winged-Edge Mesh) library is to unitize the generation, the processing and the rendering of surface representations. By writing WEM modules for the MeVisLab, developers can focus on certain tasks like a smoothing of a surface, a reduction of faces of a surface mesh, or a special rendering of data. Having a bunch of modules at hand, one can connect them in order to form mesh-processing pipelines, that solve certain problems arising in the processing and the visualization of medical data.

This library that is shipped with the MeVisLab, founds a basis for dealing with common tasks: an iso surface can be generated at a certain threshold out of medical images, the resulting surface can be reduced in its amount of primitives or can be smoothed by using different algorithms. For rendering, the surface can be colored in order to reflect certain additional information or according to a flexible coloring scheme out of the image data itself. Finally, all the generated and modifed surfaces can be saved and loaded with a variety of different file formats that are compliant with standard 3D applications.

However, the library can not cover all the possible needs of special applications, so it is designed for being easily extensible: MeVisLab offers a wizard for a fast module creation, and the developer can implement own modules to execute the special algorithms which are needed for special problems. Nevertheless, it is important to understand the fundamental data structure of the WEM, so module creation renders more efficient and stable; this documentation is meant to ease the developer's first steps.

Throughout the documentation, a basic knowledge of MeVisLab and its network mechanisms is presumed.

Note that the module wizard and thus this documentation is ment for implementing ML based modules. Although there are OpenInventor based WEM-modules in the library, those will not be discussed.

WEM - General Information

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