Interactive visualization of hepatic parenchyma with applications to surgery simulators

Computer Assisted Diagnosis/Surgery systems provide an indisputable effect on the diagnosis and surgery of hepatic diseases. We developed a CAS system to prepare a virtual environment for a physician so as to interact with liver and decide on the therapy planning. The proposed system is composed of three modules, liver segmentation, vessel extraction, and visualization/interaction. It provides the physician a virtual scalpel to cut the liver. At first, inside of liver together with the vessels are shown to the physician and then the virtual surgery is started. A toggling option makes it easy to reveal inside of liver or make it opaque during the surgery. The width, height, and depth of the cut can be changed by the user. The proposed system is a framework which can later be extended to a complete CAD/CAS system for hepatic disease analysis and therapy planning.