The LiveSync Interaction Metaphor for Smart User-Intended Visualization

The LiveSync interaction metaphor synchronizes the 2D slice view with the volumetric view to improve the efficiency of diagnosis in the clinical routine. The generation of a meaningful 3D visualization is desirable because often there is not enough contextual information provided by the slice views only. While it is easy to navigate through the slices, the interaction effort to adjust the parameters for the volumetric view is rather high. Some of the major time-consuming tasks are the localization of the feature of interest, the setup of a good viewpoint, the removal of occluding structures via clipping geometries and the adjustment of the zoom factor. LiveSync extracts the needed information to set up all these parameters by a simple picking on a structure of interest in the slice view. In this paper we present substantial enhancements of the existing concept. First, an efficient parametrization for the derived parameters is presented which allows hierarchical refinement of the search space for good views. Second, the extraction of the feature of interest is performed in a way which is adapting to the volumetric extent of the feature. The properties of the extracted features are utilized to adjust a pre-defined transfer function in a feature-enhancing manner. Third, new interaction modes are presented which allow the integration of more knowledge about the user-intended visualization without increasing the interaction effort. Finally, a new clipping technique is integrated which guarantees an unoccluded view on the structure of interest while keeping important contextual information.