Visualization in Medicine is the first book on visualization and its application to problems in medical diagnosis, education, and treatment. The book describes the algorithms, the applications and their validation (how reliable are the results?), and the clinical evaluation of the applications (are the techniques useful?). It discusses visualization techniques from research literature as well as the compromises required to solve practical clinical problems. 

The book covers image acquisition, image analysis, and interaction techniques designed to explore and analyze the data. The final chapter shows how visualization is used for planning liver surgery, one of the most demanding surgical disciplines. The book is based on several years of the authors' teaching and research experience. Both authors have initiated and lead a variety of interdisciplinary projects involving computer scientists and medical doctors, primarily radiologists and surgeons.

* A core field of visualization and graphics missing a dedicated book until now
* Written by pioneers in the field and illustrated in full color
* Covers theory as well as practice

Visualization in Medicine: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications

Visual Computing for Medicine, Second Edition, offers cutting-edge visualization techniques and their applications in medical diagnosis, education, and treatment. The book includes algorithms, applications, and ideas on achieving reliability of results and clinical evaluation of the techniques covered. Preim and Botha illustrate visualization techniques from research, but also cover the information required to solve practical clinical problems. They base the book on several years of combined teaching and research experience. This new edition includes six new chapters on treatment planning, guidance and training; an updated appendix on software support for visual computing for medicine; and a new global structure that better classifies and explains the major lines of work in the field.

Visual Computing for Medicine: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications

Augmented reality (AR) is a fast-growing application of computer graphics. AR systems overlay computer-generated graphics over the real world. The research described in this book puts an emphasis on specialized rendering techniques for AR. In the first part of this book, a new system for medical AR is discussed, which is based on a commercial surgical navigation device. A method for handling occlusion makes it possible to correctly render the occlusion of graphical objects by the anatomy of the patient. The second part of this book introduces the concept of stylized augmented reality, which applies artistic or illustrative stylization methods to AR images. Since the same type of stylization is applied to virtual and real scene elements, they become difficult to distinguish. Algorithms for the cartoon-like and painterly stylization of AR videos are described. In the third part of this book, a novel illustrative visualization method is described. This algorithm for iso-surfaces and polygonal models renders a representation of a surface and structures hidden behind it. An extension of this newly developed illustrative display style was also applied to AR video streams.

Rendering Methods for Augmented Reality

Advanced algorithms and efficient visualization techniques are of major importance in intra-operative imaging and image-guided surgery. The surgical environment is characterized by a high information flow and fast decisions, requiring efficient and intuitive presentation of complex medical data and precision in the visualization results. Regions or organs that are classified as risk structures are in this context of particular interest. This paper summarizes advanced algorithms for medical visualization with special focus on risk structures such as tumors, vascular systems and white matter fiber tracts. algorithms and techniques employed in intra-operative situations or virtual and mixed reality simulations are discussed. Finally, the prototyping and software development process of medical visualization algorithms is addressed.

Advanced Algorithms in Medical Computer Graphics

We present an application for interacting with large, point-based datasets built with commodity off-the-shelf hardware. Our system works on ordinary workstations with mouse and keyboard interaction as well as on immersive multi-head VR systems with tracked input devices. This approach allows thermodynamics and astrophysics researchers to interactively navigate, filter and inspect large datasets that result from particle-based simulations as used in those areas. We make use of an adaptive, hierarchical rendering approach and extend its data structures to optimize the interaction performance to be usable with datasets of hundreds of thousands of particles. We prove the validity of our concepts with informal user studies both in the application area and the computer science

Flexible Interaction with Large Point-Based Datasets

In the visualization of 3D medical data, the appropriateness of the achieved result is highly dependent on the application. Therefore, an intuitive interaction with the user is of utter importance in order to determine the particular aim of the visualization. In this paper, we present a novel approach for the visualization of 3D medical data with volume rendering combined with AR-based user interaction. The utilization of augmented reality (AR), with the assistance of a set of simple tools, allows the direct manipulation in 3D of the rendered data. The proposed method takes into account regions of interest defined by the user and employs this information to automatically generate an adequate transfer function. Machine learning techniques are utilized for the automatic creation of transfer functions, which are to be used during the classification stage of the rendering pipeline. The validity of the proposed approach for medical applications is illustrated.

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M. Köbele

Papers

Augmented reality interaction for semiautomatic volume classification