This paper describes several new visualization and interaction techniques that enable the use of virtual environments for routine medical purposes. A new volume-rendering method supports shaded and transparent visualization of medical image sequences in real-time with an interactive threshold definition. Based on these rendering algorithms two complementary segmentation approaches offer an intuitive assistance for a wide range of requirements in diagnosis and therapy planning. In addition, a hierarchical data representation for geometric surface descriptions guarantees an optimal use of available hardware resources and prevents inaccurate visualization. The combination of the presented techniques empowers the improved human-machine interface of virtual reality to support every interactive task in medical three-dimensional (3-D) image processing, from visualization of unsegmented data volumes up to the simulation of surgical procedures.
At the present time volume projections are robust and fast enough to be used routinely. Surface projections can be used to visualize complex and presegmented anatomical features.
A system for the visualization of three-dimensional anatomical data, derived from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) or Computed Tomography (CT), enables the physician to navigate through and interact with the patient's 3D scans in a virtual environment. This paper presents the multimodal humanmachine interaction focusing the speech input. For the concerning task, a speech understanding front-end using a special kind of semantic decoder was successfully adopted. Now, the navigation as well as certain parameters and knctions can be directly accessed by spoken commands. Using the implemented interaction modalities, speed and eficiency of the diagnosis could be considerably improved.
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