Illustrative Visualization of Medical Data Sets

Abstract

The aim of an illustrative visualization method is to provide a simplified representation of a complex scene or object. Concave and convex regions are emphasized and the surface complexity is reduced by omitting unnecessary information. This abstraction is often preferred over fully illuminated scenes in a multitude of applications. This thesis presents an overview of the state-of-the-art for feature lines. For this, the mathematical background of the differential geometry will be presented. Furthermore, this background will be adapted to triangulated surface meshes. This thesis will also present a smoothing algorithm, which smooths initial curves on triangulated surfaces. Additionally, an evaluation is shown to assess the quality of feature lines on anatomical data sets. Based on the evaluation, two conclusions in the field for medical applications were derived. From this point, this thesis presents two solutions in the field of illustrative visualization for medical data sets. A novel line drawing technique will be presented to illustrate surfaces. According to different requirements, this technique will be extended for molecular surfaces. In the field of vessel visualization with embedded blood flow, an adaptive visualization method will be introduced. This technique will also be extended to animated blood flow. Finally, this thesis shows different illustrative visualization concepts, which can be applied in various fields for depicting surface information.