Perception-Oriented Picking of Structures in Direct Volumetric Renderings
Alexander Wiebel, Frans M. Vos, Hans‐Christian Hege · 2011
Radiologists from all application areas are trained to read slice-based visualizations of 3D medical image data. Despite the numerous examples of sophisticated three-dimensional renderings, especially all variants of direct volume rendering, such methods are often considered not very useful by radiologists who prefer slice-based visual-ization. Just recently there have been attempts to bridge this gap between 2D and 3D renderings. These attempts include specialized techniques for volume picking that re-sult in repositioning slices. In this paper, we present a new volume picking tech-nique that, in contrast to previous work, does not require pre-segmented data or metadata. The positions picked by our method are solely based on the data itself, the transfer function and, most importantly, on the way the volumet-ric rendering is perceived by viewers. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method we apply it for auto-matically repositioning slices in an abdominal MRI scan, a data set from a flow simulation and a number of other volumetric scalar fields. Furthermore we discuss how the method can be implemented in combination with various different volumetric rendering techniques. 1