Interactive Visualization for Rapid Noninvasive Cardiac Assessment

New interactive computerized visualization technology promises to give doctors easier, quicker and less expensive ways to determine whether and to what extent patients have heart disease. This new visualization technology, combined with new image acquisition methods, may allow doctors to take the results of one noninvasive cardiac examination and produce a variety of 3D displays that can be easily manipulated to reveal problems that are not presently accessible without multiple costly assessments. The MRI technique is ahead of the capability of computerized visualization tools to analyze and display the resulting data. The visualization developments we discuss in this paper make both raw MRI data and derived information, such as heart wall contraction rate estimates, directly accessible to doctors.