Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
6.6.1.1 The genealogy of visualization
processing is a challenging scientific investigation in itself,
it also became imperative in biomedical research to
provide rapid visualization systems that take advantage of
this human ability. This presented the motivation for
investigative visualization systems.
Investigative visualization
Investigative visualization tries to focus on the explor-
ative aspect of visualization. These techniques generally
do not aim to provide a strict analytical solution; instead,
they aim to provide a visual solution that the human eye
might be able to interpret better. In general these ap-
proaches do not require the detailed knowledge about
the data that analytical approaches require. The explor-
ative aspect of this class of visualization has been gaining
appeal because it is essential for the clinical application of
new imaging methods. Some of the concepts in this class
are interactive or real-time volumetric visualization, dy-
namic visualization, multimodality registration, func-
tional (multidimensional) visualization, and navigational
visualization. The emphasis is usually on speed, because
interactive ability is essential to make these visualization
tools useful in practice.
Visualization phenotypes
Based on their visual characteristics resulting from their
interaction with the user environment, visualization in
medicine can be grouped into three major classes: illus-
trative visualization, investigative visualization, and imi-
tative visualization (Fig. 6.6-1). The extent to which they
embrace the technology of visualization can be consid-
ered as marginal, high, and maximum, respectively.
Illustrative visualization
Illustrative visualization developed over the past two
decades from attempts to separate visualization into two
distinctive processes: extraction of information and its
presentation. Fast processing is desirable but not critical,
whereas quality and accuracy are essential. The concepts
of illustrative visualization form the basis of the other
two classes of visualization. Illustrative systems do not
rely on interactive data manipulation but present in-
formation that may have been carefully extracted from
the data by other means.
The initial expectations of biomedical visualization
based on this approach soon reached a plateau. As stated
in a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant an-
nouncement: ''In spite of enormous advances of com-
puter hardware and data processing techniques in recent
decades, the amazing and still little understood ability of
human beings to 'see the big picture' and 'know where to
look' when presented with the visual data is still well
beyond the computer's analytic skills.'' Although trying
to characterize humans'
Imitative visualization
This class of visualization attempts to imitate reality
through visualization. The imitation can be a visual per-
ception as in virtual reality type systems or functional
imitation as in simulation and modeling. The challenge is
to provide a realistic simulation in a virtual environment.
In medicine, such a challenge arises naturally in the area
of pretreatment planning and training for interventional
and intraoperative surgical procedures. Both the speed
ability to perform such
Figure 6.6-1 Visualization pathways.
