Semi-Immersive 3D Sketching of Vascular Structures for Medical Education

Abstract

We present a semi-immersive 3D User Interface to sketch complex vascular structures and vessel pathologies by drawing centerlines in 3D. Our framework comprises on-the-fly reconstruction of the corresponding vessel surface and subsequent local surface compression and expansion. Additionally, we allow the enrichment with an illustrative, plausible blood flow visualization. Our framework is designed for medical educators and students to support anatomy and pathology education. Anatomy educators can realize the step-by-step process of creating and explaining complex spatial relationships of interlinked vascular structures and blood flow behavior. Students can view this process and explore the created structures, which helps them in reproducing and memorizing them. To create a surface model based on the sketched centerlines, we employ implicit surfaces. This allows for easy adding, editing, and removing vessel branches and achieve continuous surfaces with smooth transitions at branchings. The blood flow can be interactively added and is realized with a topology-aware particle simulation. We qualitatively evaluated our framework and demonstrate the applicability and usability of our approach.