Improving on-patient medical data visualization in a markerless augmented reality environment by volume clipping

Abstract

To improve the human perception of an augmented reality scene, its virtual and real entities can be rendered according to the focus+context visualization. This paradigm is specially important in the field of on-patient medical data visualization, as it provides insight to the physicians about the spatial relations between the patient's anatomy (focus region) and his entire body (context region). However, the current existing methods proposed in this field do not give special treatment to the effect of volume clipping, which can open new ways for physicians to explore and understand the entire scene. In this paper we introduce an on-patient focus+context medical data visualization based on volume clipping. It is proposed in a markerless augmented reality environment. From the estimated camera pose, the volumetric medical data can be displayed to a physician inside the patient's anatomy at the location of the real anatomy. To improve the visual quality of the final scene, three methods based on volume clipping are proposed to allow new focus+context visualizations. Moreover, the whole solution supports occlusion handling. From the evaluation of the proposed techniques, the results obtained highlight that these methods improve the visual quality of the final rendering. Furthermore, the application still runs in realtime.