Information visualization and its application to medicine

This paper provides an introduction to the held of information visualization (IV) and a discussion of its application to medical systems. More specifically, it aims at: (i) defining what IV is and what are its goals (ii) highlighting the similarities and differences between IV and traditional medical imaging (iii) illustrating the potential of IV for medical applications by examining several examples of implemented systems and (iv) giving some general indications about the purposes and the effective exploitation of an IV component into a medical system. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.