| Summary: | Virtual reality computer simulation is nowadays widely used in various
fields, such as aviation, military or medicine. However, the current
simulators do not completely fulfil the necessary requirements for some
fields. For example, in medicine many requirements have to be met in
order to allow a really meaningful simulation. However most current
medical simulators do not adequately meet them, reducing the usability
of these simulators for certain aspects. One of these requirements is the
visualization, which in the case of medicine has to deal with unusual data
sets, i.e. volume datasets. Additionally, training simulation for medicine
needs to calculate and visualize the physical deformations of tissue which
adds an additional challenge to the visualization in these type of simulators.
In order to overcome this limitations, a prototype of a patient specific
neurosurgery simulator has been developed. This simulator features a
fully volumetric visualization of patient data, physical interaction with the
models through the use of haptic devices and realistic physical simulation
for the tissues. This thesis presents a study about the visualization methods
necessary to achieve high quality visualization in such simulator.
The different possibilities for rigid volumetric visualization have been
studied. As a result, improvements on the current volumetric visualization
frameworks have been done. Additionally, the use of direct volumetric
isosurfaces for certain cases have been studied. The resulting visualization
scheme has been demonstrated by an intermediate craniotomy simulator.
Furthermore, the use of deformable volumetric models has been studied.
The necessary algorithms for this type of visualization have been developed
and the different rendering options have been experimentally studied. This
study gives the necessary information to make informed decisions about
the visualization in the neurosurgery simulator prototype.
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