Freehand volume cutting technique for medical visualization

In the real world, a doctor can use a knife to cut along any path on the body, unveil the skin and investigate the internals. It would be ideal if the same thing can be done on the volume data with a virtual knife. With this metaphor in mind, we develop a freehand volume cutting tool (or a virtual knife) that allows the doctor to cut the volume in freehand. The cutting path on a volumetric data surface is created with the help of Intelligent Scissor, which is an interactive technique for 2D image segmentation. Our proposed segmentation tool for volume data tends to place the curve/path along the feature lines/curves, hence freeing the doctor from fine tuning the cutting path. Once a closed cutting path is established on the extracted 3D surface mesh, the algorithm then generates the internal cutting surface (may not be a plane) which divides the volume into two sub-volumes along the cutting path. Since the internal cutting surface can be any arbitrary surface, we use a cost minimization technique to make the surface as smooth as possible. Once the volume is partitioned, we can display the cut volumes using a 3D-texture based volume rendering algorithm.