Perception-Oriented Picking of Structures in Direct Volumetric

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 visualization. Just recently there have been attempts to bridge this gap between 2D and 3D renderings. These attempts include specialized techniques for volume picking that result in repositioning slices. In this paper, we present a new volume picking technique 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 volumetric rendering is perceived by viewers. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method we apply it for automatically 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.