A fuzzy logic-guided virtual probe for 3D visual interaction applications

Medical images visualization and interaction is critical for assisted diagnosis and treatment. There are several 3D medical image visualization and interaction frameworks, but no standard tools exist for visual interaction. These tools must gain the user´s acceptance, be easy to manipulate and allow a high positioning precision during the interaction with the virtual medical volume. Among them, the virtual probes/pens gained a good acceptance. This paper presents such an interaction tool and its applications to the editing of an original or segmented volume. Its main novelty is the use of fuzzy logic in the 3D virtual probe positioning, with the advantages of a low memory usage, real-time operation and low positioning errors as compared to classical solutions. The proposed fuzzy 3D visual interaction framework integrates several functionalities to medical volume editing and visualization: 3D measurements; positioning arbitrary cutting planes; cropping a volume of interest; surface/volume smoothing; 3D morphological operations; anaglyph stereo visualization. Having a flexible architecture, many other types of processing may be easily integrated in the future.