Segmentation and 3D Visualization of Medical Image : An Overview

Abstract

In this paper, an overview of segmentation and 3D visualization methods are presented. Commonly, the two kinds of methods are used to visualize organs and vessels into 3D from medical images such as CT(A) and MRI - Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) and Iso-surface Rendering (IR). DVR can be applied directly to a volume. It directly penetrates through the volume while it determines which voxels are visualizedbased on a transfer function. On the other hand, IR requires a series of processes such as segmentation, polygonization and visualization. To extract a region of interest (ROI) from the medical volume image via the segmentation, some regions of an object and a background are required, which are typically obtained from the user. To visualize the extracted regions, the boundary points of the regions should be polygonized. In other words, the boundary surface composed of polygons such as a triangle and a rectangle should be required to visualize the regions into 3D because illumination effects, which makes the object shaded and seen in 3D, cannot be applied directly to the points.