7.1. Introduction

In this section, we give a brief overview of some graphics concepts that are required for image-guided surgery.

Computer Graphics is a big field, worthy of at least several modules on a computer science course, and the subject of many a classic text book such as: Foley et al., “Computer Graphics Principles and Practice”, as people build whole careers in computer graphics and visualisation.

For this course, once you have identified your imaging modalities, worked out tracking, calibration, registration and segmentation, we come to the part of “and now put something on the screen”. In order to do that, we will cover basic concepts. Most researchers in this field are still trying to get the underlying algorithms (registration, calibration) working, and few are working at improving their visualisation. For a good overview see [KerstenOertel2013], [KerstenOertel2015].

We will cover:

• Surface Rendering

• Mesh Decimation

• Mesh Smoothing

• Volume Rendering

• Texture Mapping