Medical visualization aims to help diagnosis, treatment, and education in the medical field. It is a young and complicated multidisciplinary field, which involves engineering, computer science, and other domains. It is exciting to see a book that can systematically give a comprehensive introduction to visual computing for medicine.
This book includes a total of 22 chapters (online chapters are included). Chapter 1 gives an introduction to visualization in medicine. Following the introduction, the book has five parts covering all aspects of medical visualization.
Part 1, “Acquisition, Analysis, and Interpretation of Medical Volume Data,” contains four chapters. Chapter 2 talks about the acquisition of medical image data. Chapter 3 gives an introduction to medical visualization in clinical practice. Image analysis, including filtering, segmentation, and registration, is discussed in chapter 4. Chapter 5 covers human-computer interaction (HCI) for medical visualization.
Part 2, “Visualization and Exploration of Medical Volume Data,” contains five chapters. Chapter 6 explores surface rendering technologies, including the marching cubes algorithm for surface extraction, mesh smoothing, and simplification. Chapters 7 and 8 investigate direct volume visualization and cover volume rendering, volumetric illumination, and artificial depth enhancements. Chapter 9 explains how volume interaction is conducted, with a focus on transfer functions. Chapter 10 is devoted to labeling and measurements.
Part 3, “Advanced Medical Visualization Techniques,” contains four chapters. Chapter 11 describes the visualization of vascular structures. Chapter 12 discusses illustrative rendering and emphasis techniques. Chapter 13 focuses on virtual endoscopy, and chapter 14 is about dimension reduction using projections and reformations.
Part 4, “Visualization of High-Dimensional Medical Image Data,” has two chapters. Chapter 15 explores the visualization of connectivity in the human brain based on diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data. Chapter 16 discusses visual exploration and analysis of perfusion data.
Part 5, “Treatment Planning, Guidance, and Training,” has five chapters. Chapter 17 gives a general introduction to computer-assisted surgery. Chapter 18 investigates image-guided surgery and augmented reality. Chapter 19 describes simulated and measured flow data visualization. Chapter 20 talks about visual computing for ear, nose, and throat (ENT) surgery planning. Chapter 21 is dedicated to computer-assisted medical education.
Finally, chapter 22 focuses on future works.
The book covers theory, algorithms, and applications of medical visualization. It offers cutting-edge visualization techniques that are presented very clearly. Furthermore, this book has a website for the online chapters, tutorials, and discussions. Although this is not a book for undergraduate students, it’s a great book for graduate students. I highly recommend it for one-semester advanced graduate courses in computer graphics. For graduate students pursuing PhDs and professionals in research and development in the medical visualization filed, this book is well worth reading.
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