Simultaneous visualization of preoperative planning models and intraoperative 2D ultrasound for liver surgery

This paper introduces new techniques for simultaneous visualization of preoperative planning models and intraoperative2D ultrasound for open liver surgery. The driving motivation for our work is to improve the visualpresentation of a moving ultrasound plane within a complex, interweaving three-dimensional model of hepaticvascular structures. Major drawbacks of existing systems are occlusions of the ultrasound plane by the planningmodel and fade-out of crucial context information. Our system allows the surgeon to focus on the ultrasound imagewhile perceiving context-relevant planning information without discarding important morphological informationand depth cues. The contribution of this paper is a GPU-accelerated rendering pipeline including new illustrativevisualization algorithms for focus \& context rendering, distance and intersection accentuation, as well as a hybridtechnique for high quality silhouette and hatching stroke generation.