High-Quality Multimodal Volume Visualization of Intracerebral Pathological Tissue

Abstract

Parallel visualization of multiple MRI sequences in 2D is a standard method for exploration of pathological structures for neurosurgery planning. In this work our aim is to support visualization techniques that allow medical experts a fast and comprehensive combined exploration of anatomical structures with inhomogeneous pathological tissue in the three-dimensional volume rendering. The prototypical software solution presented in this paper addresses the issue that a high amount of interaction is commonly needed to merge different MRI sequences and that the resulting visualization does not allow to recognize anatomical details of the brain and pathological tissue at the same time without loss of information. We also present novel clipping methods for neurological volume exploration and emphasize important structures as well as suspicious high intensity signals from multiple sequences in the volume rendering. We demonstrate that our methods facilitate comprehensive volume visualization for neurosurgery.