[IGSTK-Developers] Viewer Requirements

[Hee-su Kim]

Hi, folks:

I have a question. What is the difference between View and Viewer?

I'll just give the outline.

I think View just handles object representations, camera and annotation display parameters. (and updating..)

When viewing images, there are a lot of parameters such as W/L, slicing, volume rendering method, volume rendering parameters and so on..

I think that View requirement will be "to support displaying object representation".. not "to support specific kinds of rendering"

There should be ImageSliceRepresentation and ImageVolumeRepresentation.

ImageSliceRepresentation will have W/L, slicing parameters(like sagittal, coronal, something like that, and slice number), and other necessary parameters. 

Patient information is in ImageObject. 

Some annotations (such as Sagittal View, patient info, ...) will be displayed by View but I think this should be set by an application as multiple images or the annotation for another kind of object(not image) might be displayed.

ImageVolumeRepresentation will have volume rendering-related parameters. (opacity transfer function, color transfer function, method of rendering(raycasting, texture mapping, ...), something like that)

Both representations will have their own pipelines to render images.

View still supports every kind of rendering but not responsible for managing parameters or constructing pipelines for specific kind of rendering.

If View deals with image rendering options, then View class will be messy. (there will be a lot of methods for setting parameters)

With ObjectRepresentation and SpatialObject, multiple images could be displayed readily.

These design considerations were already made by IGSTK developers...

I'm just reminding it..  

Does this make sense?

I thought it's strange that Viewer requirements are too specific with every rendering option and Image seems tied to Viewer. I think Viewer requirements need abstraction and ObjectRepresentation deals with specific rendering options.

I might be wrong. Anyway, this was what I thought.

Regards,
Hee-Su
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