Medical Visualization – Lecture

The development of visualization techniques requires a solid understanding of the underlying data. The lecture therefore opens with an overview of medical imaging procedures and the data they produce. Many visualization and interaction techniques rely on contextual knowledge, which voxels belong to which object, how large those objects are, how they branch. Extracting this information from medical data is the role of medical image processing, and the relevant techniques are introduced or refreshed before the visualization material that depends on them.

Medical visualization algorithms form the core of the lecture. Visualization quality, image-processing efficiency, and faithful rendering of spatial relations all matter; we treat the interactive handling of these visualizations in detail, transformation of volume data, selection and highlighting, virtual resection, and measurement. The volume visualization procedures are illustrated with freely available and commercial tools, compared, and implemented in the Visualization Toolkit (VTK).

An application section covers computer-assisted anatomy training, planning of surgical interventions and other therapies, and the generation of virtual flights through the human body (virtual endoscopy). The section closes with a short overview of computer-assisted surgery, supporting the surgeon with images, augmented displays, or surgical robots.