User-Friendly Inspection of Medical Image Data Volumes in Virtual Environments

In many fields of medicine interactive virtual environments can offer enhanced visualization and manipulation of three-dimensional objects, reconstructed from high-quality scans of human organs. Stereoscopic systems provide users with a natural depth perception about the spatial nature of the structures of interest; moreover advanced user-friendly interfaces, by allowing a natural and intuitive interaction, can strengthen the feeling of being immersed, so to offer clinicians the possibility to act how they do in the real life. In order to enhance the sense of realism specially in medical computer-assisted education, training and diagnostic fields, it is necessary to have a system in which every action can be executed directly into the 3D world without switching to a 2D visualization mode. In this paper we present new interaction techniques to select and extract a volume-of-interest (VOI) in a semi-immersive interactive environment, by using a user-friendly wireless interface, suitable to implement pointing and manipulation features with 6 DOF.