Fast visualization of needle motion in volume rendered image for spine biopsy simulator

摘要

Abstract: Spine biopsy is a useful tool to detect and verify spine tumor. We have developed a spine-biopsy simulation system, which provides realistic visual and force feedback information to a user. In this paper, we present an algorithm to combine a volume-rendered image and a surface- rendered needle image. The volume rendering requires a larger amount of computations and memory space. In general, the motion of a needle is fast so that image update should be performed frequently, whereas the viewing direction is not changed so fast in visualization, so that it is not necessary to update the volume rendered organ image frequently. The realization of the medical instruments can be performed by surface rendering rather than volume rendering to visualize the fast motion of the medical instruments. Surface rendering is an efficient method to render a simple structure with less computation and memory requires. Fast combination of volume-rendered and surface- rendered images is performed with high quality realization. !12