Feature based opacity function for vessels visualization from CT
images
Moti Freiman
Current opacity functions used in volume visualization are adjusted
manually
according to the iso-values of the visualized structures. However, in
CT images of soft tissue it hard to
set a good iso-value in order to visualize soft structures like vessels
and tumors.
Several works pointed out that using multi dimensional opacity function
may improve the visualization.
However manual adjustment of a multi dimensional opacity function is
very hard.
In this work I will present a new algorithm which optimized a
multi dimensional opacity function by using the variational principle.
More specifically: I will present opacity function which used the
geometrical structure of the vessels, and the edges location as input
of the opacity function.
The geometrical structure computed using multi-scale eigenanalysis of
the Hessian matrix. The edges computed using recursive first order
Gaussian filters.
And finally, The opacity function optimized using the variational
approach to minimize energy functions.
Preliminary results will present.
References:
[1] Fattal, R. and Lischinski, D. 2001. Variational classification for
visualization of 3D ultrasound data.
In Proceedings of the Conference on Visualization '01.
VISUALIZATION. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC,
403-410.
(http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/labs/cglab/research/3dus/Fattal-vis01.pdf).
[2] A. Frangi, W. Niessen, K. Vincken, and M. Viergever. 1998.
Multiscale vessel enhancement filtering.
In W. Wells, A. Colchester, and S. Delp, editors,
MICCAI'98, volume 1496 of LNCS, pages 130--137.
Springer-Verlag, Germany. (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/frangi98multiscale.html).