Expressive anatomical illustrations based on scanned patient data

The art and profession of medical illustration depend not only on the talent and skills of an illustrator, but also on the complimentary knowledge of human anatomy. Therefore, anatomical illustrations were mostly based on comprehensive dissections and observations during surgery. Recently, illustrative visualization techniques have been utilized to illustrate features and shapes of anatomical objects. Thereby, illustrative visualization provides representations that highlight relevant features, while deemphasizing irrelevant details. However, anatomical illustrations usually include multiple neighboring structures, which increases the complexity of the illustration problem, as the relationship between multiple organs still remains difficult to convey. In this paper, we present an approach for the combined illustrative visualization of multiple anatomical structures based on scanned patient data. To enhance the expressiveness, we incorporate multiple stylized rendering and shading techniques, and propose strategies for tuning object attributes (such as color, opacity, and silhouette), which allows to better perceive the spatial relationship between objects as well as to draw the focus to targeted structures.