Virtual reality and multimedia human-computer interaction in medicine

Tomography devices produce high-quality scans of the human anatomy. While conventional computer-aided image analysis falls back upon editing tomograms layer by layer, virtual environments offer enhanced visualization, image analysis and manipulation of the three-dimensional (3D) data. In this paper, the application of multimodal, user-oriented human-computer interaction is presented. Hand gesture recognition is a major component of the interface, completed by speech understanding and further units like a 6-DOF mouse or acoustic feedback. 3D image segmentation and virtual endoscopy are typical examples to demonstrate virtual environments in medicine.