Speaker: Dirk Bartz (Universität Tübingen, Germany)
Medical imaging is one of the most established practical fields of visualization. While most used methods deal with individual images from 3D scanners - volumes are seen as stack of images -, 3D visualizations are slowly moving into the daily practice of research hospitals.
Major challenges in this process is the difficult specification of how the features in volume datasets are visualized (transfer functions, etc), occlusion of interesting features by others, and fast increasing size of datasets. While a few years ago 256^3 datasets were the standard size in radiology, the current standard size already increased to 512^2x1000 volumes. Soon, highfield-MRI scanners will even produce volumes of 2048^2 x 1000 in research applications.
In this talk, I will discuss several techniques how to deal with large medical data. In particular, I will present work in the context of virtual endoscopy, a medical procedure oriented visualization technique that provides an environment familiar to physicians.