Interactive Volume Visualization and Editing Methods for Surgical Applications

Volumetric imaging modalities are increasingly being used in surgical applications. However, visualizing the 3D information contained in these datasets effectively on a 2D display is a challenging problem. Most important issues to overcome are the occlusion of different anatomical features of each other and the difficulty of visualizing the depth information of a given pixel in a 2D image. Moreover, the resulting image is aimed to be used to guide actions performed on the patient, therefore the mental registration of real and virtual spaces has to be considered when designing visualization and interaction