Browsing by Author "Engel, Klaus"

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    Adaptive Temporal Sampling for Volumetric Path Tracing of Medical Data
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Martschinke, Jana; Hartnagel, Stefan; Keinert, Benjamin; Engel, Klaus; Stamminger, Marc; Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep
    Monte-Carlo path tracing techniques can generate stunning visualizations of medical volumetric data. In a clinical context, such renderings turned out to be valuable for communication, education, and diagnosis. Because a large number of computationally expensive lighting samples is required to converge to a smooth result, progressive rendering is the only option for interactive settings: Low-sampled, noisy images are shown while the user explores the data, and as soon as the camera is at rest the view is progressively refined. During interaction, the visual quality is low, which strongly impedes the user's experience. Even worse, when a data set is explored in virtual reality, the camera is never at rest, leading to constantly low image quality and strong flickering. In this work we present an approach to bring volumetric Monte-Carlo path tracing to the interactive domain by reusing samples over time. To this end, we transfer the idea of temporal antialiasing from surface rendering to volume rendering. We show how to reproject volumetric ray samples even though they cannot be pinned to a particular 3D position, present an improved weighting scheme that makes longer history trails possible, and define an error accumulation method that downweights less appropriate older samples. Furthermore, we exploit reprojection information to adaptively determine the number of newly generated path tracing samples for each individual pixel. Our approach is designed for static, medical data with both volumetric and surface-like structures. It achieves good-quality volumetric Monte-Carlo renderings with only little noise, and is also usable in a VR context.
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    Neural Denoising for Path Tracing of Medical Volumetric Data
    (ACM, 2020) Hofmann, Nikolai; Martschinke, Jana; Engel, Klaus; Stamminger, Marc; Yuksel, Cem and Membarth, Richard and Zordan, Victor
    In this paper, we transfer machine learning techniques previously applied to denoising surface-only Monte Carlo renderings to path-traced visualizations of medical volumetric data. In the domain of medical imaging, path-traced videos turned out to be an efficient means to visualize and understand internal structures, in particular for less experienced viewers such as students or patients. However, the computational demands for the rendering of high-quality path-traced videos are very high due to the large number of samples necessary for each pixel. To accelerate the process, we present a learning-based technique for denoising path-traced videos of volumetric data by increasing the sample count per pixel; both through spatial (integrating neighboring samples) and temporal filtering (reusing samples over time). Our approach uses a set of additional features and a loss function both specifically designed for the volumetric case. Furthermore, we present a novel network architecture tailored for our purpose, and introduce reprojection of samples to improve temporal stability and reuse samples over frames. As a result, we achieve good image quality even from severely undersampled input images, as visible in the teaser image.
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    Projection Mapping for In-Situ Surgery Planning by the Example of DIEP Flap Breast Reconstruction
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Martschinke, Jana; Klein, Vanessa; Kurth, Philipp; Engel, Klaus; Ludolph, Ingo; Hauck, Theresa; Horch, Raymund; Stamminger, Marc; Oeltze-Jafra, Steffen and Smit, Noeska N. and Sommer, Björn and Nieselt, Kay and Schultz, Thomas
    Nowadays, many surgical procedures require preoperative planning, mostly relying on data from 3D imaging techniques like computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging. However, preoperative assessment of this data is carried out on the PC (using classical CT/MR viewing software) and not on the patient's body itself. Therefore, surgeons need to transfer both their overall understanding of the patient's individual anatomy and also specific markers and labels for important points from the PC to the patient only with the help of imaginative power or approximative measurement. In order to close the gap between preoperative planning on the PC and surgery on the patient, we propose a system to directly project preoperative knowledge to the body surface by projection mapping. As a result, we are able to display both assigned labels and a volumetric and view-dependent view of the 3D data in-situ. Furthermore, we offer a method to interactively navigate through the data and add 3D markers directly in the projected volumetric view. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach using DIEP flap breast reconstruction as an example. By means of a small pilot study, we show that our method outperforms standard surgical planning in accuracy and can easily be understood and utilized even by persons without any medical knowledge.