The fundamental data structure and software in a surgical simulation system using three dimensional image

Using a three dimensional image such as a sequence of X-ray CT slices, we have been developing a surgical simulation system with clinically useful functions for craniofacial and orthopaedic surgical plannings. In this paper, we describe the fundamental data structure such as the representation of 3 D (input) and 2 D (projected) images in this system, the coordinate system and the transformation of coordinates, projection etc., and the fundamental softwares for surgical operations such as cut, translation and rotation. The proposed techniques can be applied not only to the medical field, but also to other scientific and technological fields for image processing. (author)