Visualization of Segmented Structures in 3D Multimodal Medical Data Sets

Abstract

The simultaneous inspection of images obtained using different medical scanning methods represents a common practice for accurate medical diagnosis. The term multimodality refers to multiple medical data sets obtained by scanning a patient with the same method at different time moments or with different scanning techniques. Recent research efforts in computer graphics have attempted to solve the problem of visualizing multimodal data in the same scene, for a better understanding of human anatomy or for pathology tracking. This paper proposes a method of integrating segmented structures from a contrast enhanced MRI sequence into the volume reconstructed from the slices of another MRI sequence obtained with different scanning parameters. A direct volume rendering (DVR) approach is used to represent focus and context information from the 3D data. The presented approach aims to help physicians in understanding pathologies and in the process of accurate diagnosis establishment.

Keywords

• computer graphics
• visualization
• medical diagnostic imaging