VisHeart: A Visualization and Analysis Tool for Multidimensional Data.

New MRI techniques enable the reconstruction of multidimensional data sets, including 3D volumes of cardiac image data reconstructed along both cardiac and respiratory phases. However, these new type of data present several challenges in their manipulation, visualization and analysis, and there are no off-the-shelf tools for the interactive visualization of such high-dimensional data sets. Such a tool, in order to be successful, must deal with large amounts of data, producing animations with no lagging and allowing users to interact in real-time with the volumes. Therefore, one must use efficient lossless compression techniques in order to keep the information while allowing the tool to manipulate the data efficiently. In this work, we report on the development of VisHeart, a multi-platform open source tool for the visualization and analysis of multidimensional cardiac data. The experiments reported here culminated in a file format composed of a combination of standard compression techniques, allowing for the compression of the test dataset with a rate of 2.954 in approximately 6 min, while keeping the decompression time to approximately 15 s for a dataset formed by 52 volumes with $$192 \times 192 \times 192$$ voxels. After the initial decompression, the dataset can be visualized in real-time.