Hardware-accelerated illustrative medical surface visualization with extended shading maps

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new framework for the illustrative visualization of medical surface data. In most visualization frameworks, only light intensity is used to determine the surface shading. The analysis of medical textbooks reveals more complex shading approaches. The parameters of these approaches are mapped to different Shading Maps, which may be weighted and flexibly combined. We discuss the use of high-level attributes to simplify the specification. The resulting Shading Map is used as a lookup to determine the final intensity at a certain area. For this purpose, the rendering is accomplished on GPU by using OpenGL's Framebuffer Objects. This framework may be useful for interactive educational systems or for medical record printings. ©Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.