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11 3D Medical Imaging

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Fig. 11.5 Example MRI images: a T1 image of the knee (left) and a T2 image of the head (right)

interactions. Examples of such images are given in Fig. 11.5. It is also possible to use phase contrast (remember the complex number nature of the data), to visualize flows and even tensor contrast in diffusion tensor MRI (see Sect. 11.6).

11.2.4 Summary

For the three modalities that we have considered, this section has tried to underline where artifacts come from and what kind of 3D data to expect. In summary, CT is good for very high quality 3D images of specific regions focussing on bone and other dense tissues. MRI is the method of choice for visualization of soft tissue and is very flexible, but is slightly lower resolution than CT and more sensitive to motion. PET is lower resolution again, but provides functional data, since it shows where metabolism is occurring. Another message is that some knowledge of signal processing is a vital skill for understanding why medical images look as they do, in particular issues relating to the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. Note that recent developments in reconstruction for all modalities are tending towards iterative reconstruction methods. This is the default in PET and there are algebraic methods in CT and conjugate gradient methods in MRI. So basic knowledge of inverse problems and numerical linear algebra can also be helpful. We haven’t covered ultrasound due to lack of space and also because it is less commonly used in a 3D modality.

11.3 Surface Extraction and Volumetric Visualization

As previously mentioned, much of this book concentrates on 2D surfaces embedded in 3D space. Although medical images are volumetric 3D representations of the patient, there are times when such a surface representation is useful. For example, triangulated surfaces are readily rendered by graphics hardware. A surface representation would be useful to provide an interactive 3D model of the patient. In this section, we will consider how such a representation can be created from a volume image, but also consider ways that a volume image can be rendered without extracting a surface.