Volume Visualization in the Clinical Practice

Volumetric data is common in medicine, geology and engineering, but the O(n) complexity in data and algorithms has prevented the widespread use of volume graphics. Recently, 3D image processing and visualization algorithms have been parallelized and ported to graphics processing units. Today, medical diagnostics highly depends on volumetric imaging methods that must be visualized in real-time. However, daily clinical practice shows that physicians still prefer simple 2D multiplanar reconstructions over 3D visualizations for intervention planning. Therefore, a very basic question in this context is, if real-time 3D image synthesis is necessary at all. This paper makes four main observations in a clinical context, which are evaluated with 24 independent physicians from three different European hospitals.