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Visualization in Medicine and Life Sciences pp 39–59Cite as

3D Visualization of Vasculature: An Overview

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Part of the book series: Mathematics and Visualization ((MATHVISUAL))

Summary

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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany

    Bernhard Preim & Steffen Oeltze

Authors
  1. Bernhard Preim
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  2. Steffen Oeltze
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering and Science, Jacobs University Bremen, P.O. Box 750561, 28725, Bremen, Germany

    Lars Linsen

  2. Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, 67653, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Hans Hagen

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA, 95616-8562, USA

    Bernd Hamann

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© 2008 Springer

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Preim, B., Oeltze, S. (2008). 3D Visualization of Vasculature: An Overview. In: Linsen, L., Hagen, H., Hamann, B. (eds) Visualization in Medicine and Life Sciences. Mathematics and Visualization. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72630-2_3

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