Brain virtual dissection and white matter 3D visualization

This paper presents an immersive visualization tool that helps anatomists to establish a ground truth for brain white matter fiber bundles. Each step of a progressive anatomical dissection of human brain hemisphere is acquired using a high resolution 3D laser scanner and a photographic device. Each resulting surface is textured with a high resolution image and registered into a common 3D space using fiducial landmarks. Surfaces can be visualized using stereoscopic hardware and are interactively selectable. The tool allows the user to identify specific fiber bundle parts. Extracted fiber bundles are stacked together and rendered in stereoscopy with the corresponding MR volume. Surgeons have validated this tool for creating ground truth in medical imaging with the perspective of validating tractography algorithms.