I'm going to work on implementing 3d display of dicom files and I'm wondering which technologies is easier to use: Java 3D or VTK? I'm not very experienced programmer,but I've already created a DICOM viewer based on dcm4che open source library.
Any hints or experiences to share?
Most of my 3D modeling is Optical Coherence Tomography data that tends to be rather large. My experience has been a little backwards. The project started as a C++ project using x64 VTK and Qt. Folks in the lab weren't C++ people, so it got converted to Java which is used through Matlab, which the lab post-docs know.
Java VTK is really easy to use and has a lot of features, but I'm having some trouble with registering callback events for buttons and such with will be a deal breaker if it can't get resolved. This problem might dramatically effect how the UI is done, so keep that in mind.
Most of the C++ examples tend to convert to Java really quickly (except callbacks >.< ) so there is a plethora of examples. If you are going to use VTK, I highly recommend "The VTK User's Guide" by Kitware, Inc (ISBN: 978-1-930934-23-8), as it is an excellent overview of the API.
Good luck!