ZHENLAN WANG
School of Computing; Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore
CHEE-KONG CHUI
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore
YIYU CAI
School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
CHUAN-HENG ANG
School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore
SWEE-HIN TEOH
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Received 9 March 2004
Revised 7 June 2005
Accepted 19 October 2005

Microsurgery is a highly complex surgical procedure on small body parts performed by a dedicated surgical team. An operating microscope is typically used to obtain a precise view of the soft tissues. The complexity of the microsurgical procedure makes it a suitable application of virtual/augmented reality technology for training purpose. In this paper, we present an overview of our simulator and then describe in details the visualization work that reconstructs the magnified view of the operating area from medical images. The visualization component is based entirely on our newly proposed dynamic linear level octree (DLLO)-based volume rendering methods. In comparison with the conventional ray casting algorithms, our computational method achieves fast rendering speed, reduces hardware requirement and combines surface-volume rendering for realistic and interactive PC-based medical simulations. The new algorithms are suitable for rendering dynamic medical data which are increasingly popular clinically.

4D volume rendering; dynamic linear level octree; microsurgery; simulation