Osirix Imaging - Articles, Tutorials & Resources for Medical Illustrators

To create a QuickTime movie of a beating heart in OsiriX, you just need a 4D cardiac CT dataset.

1. Download a study from the DICOM sample image sets . For this tutorial, I used MAGIX, a 4D cardiac CT scan of a heart.

image via http://pubimage.hcuge.ch:8080/

2. Copy the study to your desktop. Right click and open the folder to unzip it.

3. To import the study into OsiriX, click the unzipped folder from your desktop and drag it to the Local DICOM database window. Or click the Import button and choose your folder from the desktop. You can also select File> Import> Import Files and choose your folder.

In the OsiriX Database dialog box, click on Copy Files.

4. Once the files are copied in to the Local Database, select the study and click on all of the thumbnails by clicking on the first thumbnail, pressing shift and clicking on the last thumbnail. Next, click on the 4D viewer button to open it.

5. Under the 2D/3D button, click on 3D Volume Rendering.

6. After the 3D reconstruction opens in the 3D viewer window, select a 3D Preset and click apply. I used Mid Contrast in the Basic Group.

7. Select the rotate tool and manipulate the 3D reconstruction to view the heart.

8. To isolate the heart, select the crop tool and drag the green spheres of the crop box to remove bone and other tissues. (if you need help with the crop tool, see step 15 in my fly through tutorial). When you are finished cropping, click on the crop tool to deselect the crop box.

9. Use the scissors tool to cut out any remaining tissue surrounding the heart (if you need help with the scissors tool, see steps 6 and 7 in my fly through tutorial).

10. You can further modify the 3D reconstruction of the heart by adjusting the shading menu or working with the CLUT editor in OsiriX.

11. Once you are satisfied with the 3D reconstruction, you can use the 4D player to play the series. If you don’t see the 4D player, you can customize the toolbar by right clicking on it and adding it.

12. To export the 4D series of the heart, select File> Export> Export to QuickTime.

In the QuickTime Export dialog box, click on Temporal Series.

13. Save the QuickTime movie and change the movie settings to meet the needs of your project.

Esther Pulley is a recent graduate of the Biomedical Visualization program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.