Illustrative Visualization of Anatomical Structures

Abstract: Illustrative visualization is a term for visualization techniques inspired by traditional technical and medical illustration. These techniques are based on knowledge of the human perception and provide effective visual abstraction to make the visualizations more understandable. Within volume rendering these expressive visualizations can be achieved using non-photorealistic rendering that combines different levels of abstraction to convey the most important information to the viewer. In this thesis I will look at illustrative techniques and show how these can be used to visualize anatomical structures in a medical volume data. The result of the thesis is a prototype of an anatomy education application, that makes use of illustrative techniques to have a focus+context visualization with feature enhancement, tone shading and labels describing the anatomical structures. This results in an expressive visualization and interactive exploration of the human anatomy.