Simultaneous Visualization of Preoperative Planning Models and Intraoperative 2D Ultrasound for Liver Surgery

Abstract

This paper introduces new techniques for simultaneous visualization of preoperative planning models and intraoperative 2D ultrasound for open liver surgery. The driving motivation for our work is to improve the visual presentation of a moving ultrasound plane within a complex, interweaving three-dimensional model of hepatic vascular structures. Major drawbacks of existing systems are occlusions of the ultrasound plane by the planning model and fade-out of crucial context information. Our system allows the surgeon to focus on the ultrasound image while perceiving context-relevant planning information without discarding important morphological information and depth cues. The contribution of this paper is a GPU-accelerated rendering pipeline including new illustrative visualization algorithms for focus & context rendering, distance and intersection accentuation, as well as a hybrid technique for high quality silhouette and hatching stroke generation.