2. Three-dimensional visualization

2.1 Visualization and medical imaging

Medical image acquisition techniques continue to undergo tremendous development in three main directions:

• improved image resolution ;

• better signal-to-noise ratio ;

• increasingly specific imaging modalities.

This has several consequences for the practitioner:

• Firstly, the amount of data to be analyzed tends to increase enormously (an MRI image can have over 100 slices, each slice having a resolution of 512 pixels by 512 pixels);

• In addition, improved acquisition speed enables the creation of temporal sequences of images...