Tutorials

Tutorial title: Visual Medicine: Techniques and Applications for Computer-assisted Surgery

Lecturers and Affiliation: Dirk Bartz, University of Leipzig, ICCAS, Germany
Oliver Burgert, University of Leipzig, ICCAS, Germany

Tutorial outline:
One of the largest application domains of visual computing is medicine. Image processing methods are widely used to identify anatomical structures or to enhance the data quality of acquired image data. 3D computer graphics is employed to efficiently and effectively present complex anatomical and functional information of the human body. Surgeons and medical technicians interact with these data to explore access ways and to identify target areas and risk structures. All together, visual computing is essential in both daily health-care practice and in clinical research.

In particular, recent developments in image acquisition, diagnostic procedures and minimally-invasive surgery require an advanced planning and intra-operative support through computer science methods. With the increased spatial and temporal resolution, 3D visualizations become important for selected diagnostic procedures and for a wide range of therapy planning scenarios ranging from radiation treatment planning to neurosurgical interventions.

Finally, the advent of intraoperative navigation gives rise to augmented reality techniques to support medical doctors during surgery.

In this tutorial, we will first give an introduction into medical imaging methods - such as data acquisition, data analysis, segmentation, registration and rendering - both in 2D and 3D. Based on this foundation, the course will further explore a variety of advanced topics of visual medicine. In particular, we will discuss special representation techniques that mimic minimally-invasive procedure, OR-fit mixed reality methods for surgery, and the analysis
of the workflow for surgical procedures in the OR.

Together, these topics form important components towards more realistic interaction with the virtualized human body. Besides the technical aspects, we will also discuss the advantages to traditional methods, but will also illustrate their specific and inherent limitations.

Tutorial Syllabus:

I Introduction, 10min

II Basics of Medical Imaging, 80min

- Data Modalities, Volume Data, and Data Artifacts

- Segmentation, Classification, Registration and Fusion

- Visualization and Navigation

III Applications, 80min

- Intraoperative Navigation and Medical Mixed Reality

- Virtual Endoscopy

- Surgerical DICOM and Surgical Workflow Analysis

IV Discussion, 10min

Information about the lecturers:



Dirk Bartz is Professor for Computer-Aided Surgery at the University of Leipzig. He was head of the research group on Visual Computing for Medicine of the University of TYbingen. He was member of the executive committee of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC), speaker of the Eurographics Working Group on Parallel Graphics, and founding/steering member of the "Gesellschaft fYr Informatik" working groups on Medical Visualization and Data Visualization. In 1998, 2002, and 2004, he was co-chair of the "9th Eurographics Workshop on Visualization in Scientific Computing" (now known as EuroVis), and of the 4th and 5th "Eurographics Workshop on Parallel Graphics and Visualization".
Dirk Bartz studied computer science and medicine at the University of Erlangen-NYrnberg and at Stony Brook University. He received a Diploma (M.S.) in computer science from the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg in 1997, and in 2001 a Ph.D. in computer science and a habilation in computer science from the University of Tubingen (all in Germany).
His main research interests are in visual medicine and medical imaging, medical mixed reality, visualization of large datasets, man-machine interfaces, parallel/grid computing, and data visualization. In 2002, he received the NDI Young Investigator Award for his work in virtual endoscopy and intra-operative navigation.



Oliver Burgert is head of the research group "Scientific Methods" at the Innvation Center Computer Assisted Surgery (ICCAS) at the University Leipzig, Germany. He studied Informatics at Universitet Karlsruhe (TH), Germany. After that he worked as a research scientist in the "Collaborative Research Fund: Information Technology in Medicine" (SFB 414), and other medical simulation and planning projects in CMF-, heart-, and neurosurgery. He wrote his doctoral thesis on "Planning and Support of Shape Changing Surgical Interventions in Maxillo-facial Surgery using Volumetric Data" at the IAIM, Universitet Karlsruhe (TH) in 2005. His research is focused on description and analysis of surgical interventions (Surgical Workflows) and patient modelling. Standardization of patient model storage and communication in the OR in the context of DICOM are an application field of his research. He is involved in several DICOM project groups (Ontologies and Surgical Workflow, Image Processing and Display). Clinical application fields are simulation- and planning systems in ENT, heart and neurosurgery