3D medical imaging

This chapter overviews three-dimensional (3D) medical imaging and the associated analysis techniques. The methods described here aim to reconstruct the inside of the human body in three dimensions. This is in contrast to optical methods that try to reconstruct the surface of viewed objects, although there are similarities in some of the geometries and techniques used. Due to the wide scope of medical imaging it is unrealistic to attempt an exhaustive or detailed description of techniques. Rather, the aim is to provide some illustrations and directions for further study for the interested reader. The first section gives an overview of the physics of data acquisition, where images come from and why they look the way they do. The next section illustrates how this raw data is processed into surface and volume data for viewing and analysis. This is followed by a description of how to put images in a common coordinate frame and a more specific case study illustrating higher dimensional data manipulation. Finally, we describe some clinical applications to show how these methods can be used to provide effective treatment of patients.