3d Visualization Of Vasculature: An Overview

A large variety of techniques has been developed to visualize vascular structures. These techniques differ in the necessary preprocessing effort, in the computational effort to create the visualizations, in the accuracy with. respect to the underlying image data and in the visual quality of the result. In this overview, we compare 3D visualization methods and discuss their applicability for diagnosis, therapy planning and educational purposes. We consider direct volume rendering as well as surface rendering.In particular, we distinguish model-based approaches, which rely on model assumptions to create "idealized" easy-to-interpret visualizations and model-free approaches, which represent the data more faithfully. Furthermore, we discuss interaction techniques to explore vascular structures and illustrative techniques which map additional information on a vascular tree, such as the distance to a tumor. Finally, navigation within vascular trees (virtual angioscopy) is discussed. Despite the diversity and number of existing methods, there is still a demand for future research which is also discussed.