Automatic Textual Annotation for Surgical Planning

Textual annotations enhance visualizations and provide additional information such as object names or measures, e.g. volumes or distances. They are essential for surgery planning, in particular for documentation and collaborative discussions. For optimal use, it is crucial that the relation between visualized objects and related annotations is unambiguous and easily perceived. We describe a framework to automatically annotate 2D slices and derived 3D reconstructions of segmented structures. Based on a discussion of specific requirements, we present dedicated types of annotations for medical visualizations. Furthermore, we introduce a new interaction technique for the annotation and visualization of currently hidden objects, and present an evaluation of our framework.