Curvature-dependent surface visualization of vascular structures.

Efficient visualization of vascular structures is essential for therapy planning and medical education. Existing techniques achieve high-quality visualization of vascular surfaces at the cost of low rendering speed and large size of resulting surface. In this paper, we present an approach for visualizing vascular structures by exploiting the local curvature information of a given surface. To handle complex topology of loop and multiple parents and/or multiple children, bidirectional adaptive sampling and modified normal calculations at joints are proposed. The proposed method has been applied to cerebral vascular trees, liver vessel trees, and aortic vessel trees. The experimental results show that it can obtain a high-quality surface visualization with fewer polygons in the approximation.