CAVE-technology for visualizing medical imagery Florian Kral a, * , Andreas H. Mehrle b , Ron Kikinis c , Wolfgang Freysinger a a 4D Visualization Laboratory, Department of ENT, Medical University Innsbruck, Anichstr. 35, Innsbruck 6020, Austria b Institute for Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria c Surgical Planning Laboratory, Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA Abstract. As medical data acquisition has become digital and tomographical scanners allow three- dimensional reconstruction in ease, it is still standard to analyze the data plane by plane or in a multiplanar view. Both are limited to two-dimensional environments and cause difficulties in analyzing complex anatomical and pathological structures. Decreasing hardware prices and PC- clusters, which can compare with more expensive super-computers, will help implementing virtual environments in medicine for teaching, simulation and interacting with medical image data. Using free open source software, such as 3D-Slicer, for segmentation and preparing the data for the CAVE is quick and suitable for clinical use as well as for education. For educational purposes, the use of very high-resolution data sets will be ideal and could be made available for everyone, based on the open source philosophy. D 2004 CARS and Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: CAVE; Visualization; Virtual environment; Multiuser; Medical imaging 1. Introduction Implementation of computer-aided surgery (CAS) in the modern practice of surgery in a variety of surgical disciplines opened up a manifold of graphical representations of complex radiologic data sets pre- and intraoperatively. Three-dimensional models, built from these data sets either manually or (semi-)automatic are quite common now, but they are still restricted to a two-dimensional presentation to the user on a screen or a beamer. In order to overcome these drawbacks we have started using the CAVE-technology for educating surgeons and residents in ENT-surgery on the complex anatomical findings especially in the petrous bone. This high-end augmented reality device has hitherto never been used for displaying extremely high-resolution medical data. Moreover, this tool does have a significant potential for surgical planning in selected cases. Leaving the field of artificial modelling for demonstration purposes, which is not really suitable for medical/ 0531-5131/ D 2004 CARS and Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ics.2004.03.327 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +43-512-5042-314; fax: +43-512-5045-231. E-mail address: florian.kral@uibk.ac.at (F. Kral). www.ics-elsevier.com International Congress Series 1268 (2004) 644 – 647