Computer graphics in medicine

Abstract

Medicine is an extremely challenging field of research, which has been -- more than any other discipline -- of fundamental importance in human existence. The variety and inherent complexity of unsolved problems has made it a major driving force for many natural and engineering sciences. Hence, from the early days of computer graphics the medical field has been one of most important application areas with an enduring provision of exciting research challenges. Conversely, individual graphics tools and methods have become increasingly irreplaceable in modern medicine, where medical imaging systems are only one prominent example.The purpose of the following article is twofold: Without claiming completeness, the first part gives a brief retrospective of the fruitful relationship between computer graphics and individual subareas of the medical field. We start with early imaging and 3D visualization and move via interactive, collaborative data analysis to the emerging field of surgery simulation. The second part of the paper presents a more detailed view on the interdisciplinary field of virtual and simulated surgery which encompasses knowledge from medicine, computer graphics, computer vision, mechanics, material sciences, robotics and numeric analysis The author describes the leading role of graphics and VR as core technologies and summarizes his personal vision of current and future research problems, which have to be pursued for realizing our vision of fully interactive and immersive surgery simulation.