A radial structure tensor and its use for shape-encoding medical visualization of tubular and nodular structures.

The concept of curvature and shape-based rendering is beneficial for medical visualization of CT and MRI image volumes. Color-coding of local shape properties derived from the analysis of the local Hessian can implicitly highlight tubular structures such as vessels and airways, and guide the attention to potentially malignant nodular structures such as tumors, enlarged lymph nodes, or aneurysms. For some clinical applications, however, the evaluation of the Hessian matrix does not yield satisfactory renderings, in particular for hollow structures such as airways, and densely embedded low contrast structures such as lymph nodes.

Real-time interactive viewing of 4D kinematic MR joint studies.

Assessment of soft tissue in normal and abnormal joint motion today gets feasible by acquiring time series of 3D MRI images. However, slice-by-slice viewing of such 4D kinematic images is cumbersome, and does not allow appreciating the movement in a convenient way. Simply presenting slice data in a cine-loop will be compromised by through-plane displacements of anatomy and "jerks" between frames, both of which hamper visual analysis of the movement.