Non-Photorealistic Rendering for Minimally Invasive Procedures

Abdominal aortic aneurysms are a common disease of the aorta which are treated minimally invasive in about 33 % of the cases. Treatment is done by placing a stent graft in the aorta to prevent the aneurysm from growing. Guidance during the procedure is facilitated by fluoroscopic imaging. Unfortunately, due to low soft tissue contrast in X-ray images, the aorta itself is not visible without the application of contrast agent. To overcome this issue, advanced techniques allow to segment the aorta from pre-operative data, such as CT or MRI. Overlay images are then subsequently rendered from a mesh representation of the segmentation and fused to the live fluoroscopic images with the aim of improving the visibility of the aorta during the procedure. The current overlay images typically use forward projections of the mesh representation. This fusion technique shows deficiencies in both the 3-D information of the overlay and the visibility of the fluoroscopic image underneath. We present a novel approach to improve the visualization of the overlay images using non-photorealistic rendering techniques. Our method preserves the visibility of the devices in the fluoroscopic images while, at the same time, providing 3-D information of the fused volume. The evaluation by clinical experts shows that our method is preferred over current state-of-the-art overlay techniques. We compared three visualization techniques to the standard visualization. Our silhouette approach was chosen by clinical experts with 67 %, clearly showing the superiority of our new approach.