Animation and Exploration for Intervention Planning

3M ETHODOLOGY In-depth interviews with medical doctors along with evaluations of existing applications and exploration techniques and detailed work- flow analyses provided a base to identify the lacks in intervention planning processes using 3D visualizations. Major requirements were detected in techniques to support the exploration of 3D data for intervention planning, techniques to create case presentations for interdisciplinary discussions and techniques to document deci- sions made in the intervention planning process. Due to the immense number of cases in clinical routine, the uti- lization of 3D visualizations should be as extensive as possible and run automatically on each patient dataset. Concerning the differ- ences between the patients and their individual anatomy, this im- plies a high adaptivity. Besides the automation, a large amount of standardization is desirable. The same structures shall be visua- lized in the same style and similar pathologies shall be shown from similar viewpoints. Due to the individuality of each intervention planning process, the medical doctor shall have the opportunity to change each parameter of the visualization, like visible structures or viewpoints on his or her own. For intervention planning mostly a pre-segmentation of struc- tures is performed. Hence, I focus on isosurface visualization.