Multi-dimensional volume rendering for PC- based medical simulation

Abstract

Volume rendering is a method of displaying three-dimensional arrays of sampled data as a two-dimensional image. It has been used for visualization of medical/clinical data. With the advancement in radiological science, dynamic scanning of patient anatomy is increasingly popular in clinical applications. Visualization of these four-dimensional/time-varying volume data helps clinicians for better diagnosis and treatment. Nevertheless, it poses a new challenge to the computer graphics community with the tremendous increase in complexity and size of data. This thesis describes two new time-varying volume rendering algorithms. They are well designed to exploit the four-dimensional features of time-series volumetric data and have achieved outstanding performance in terms of both speed optimization and space reduction as compared to conventional methods. The two algorithms have been successfully used in medical simulation systems to provide interactive and real-time four-dimensional volume rendering on personal computers.