Definition of Volume Transformations for Volume Interaction

Volume transformations of medical images play an important role for many applications such as registration of different modalities, mapping atlases onto clinical data, or simulation of surgical procedures. While registration and atlas mapping can for the major number of applications be performed without tight time constraints, it is essential for simulation systems that they allow real-time interaction. As any computational method in volumes is usually very time consuming, current approaches do mainly concentrate on surface manipulations instead of transforming the entire volume. This paper describes an approach, which overcomes this problem by first defining the volume manipulation on basis of surface models, which ensure real time performance, and in a second step the transformation is applied to the entire volume by interpolating the mapping parameters using scattered data interpolation methods.