One of the largest application domains of visualization is medicine. Numerous techniques ranging from medical imaging to virtual medicine are used in both daily health-care practice and in research. In particular, recent developments in minimally-invasive surgery require an advanced planning and intra-operative support through computer science methods. Even until recently, 2D medical imaging remains the standard for the planning of these interventions, while 3D and virtual medicine methods are only slowly merging into hospitals. This however, has dramatically changed in surgical disciplines that use systems for image-guided surgery (IGS).

In this tutorial, we will first give an introduction into medical imaging methods - such as data acquisition, data analysis, segmentation, registration and rendering - both in 2D and 3D. Based on this foundation, the course will further explore a variety of advanced topics of visual medicine. In particular, we will discuss virtual endoscopy, OR-fit mixed reality methods for surgery, diffusion tensor imaging, liver-surgery planning, GPU-aided tomographic reconstruction, and soft-tissue simulation - some of the most actively researched fields in visual medicine. Together, these topics form important components towards more realistic interaction with digital models of human bodies. Beyond the technical aspects, we will also discuss the advantages of these techniques over traditional methods, and illustrate their specific and inherent limitations.