Interactive surface rendering for medical visualization

Abstract

A data structure and a visibility preprocessing technique are introduced to assist in the manipulation and to accelerate the rendering of the primitives generated by a volumetric surface reconstruction algorithm such as the Marching Cubes Algorithm. A view oriented traversal algorithm of the data structure is described. The traversal scheme allows the ordered display of semi-transparent surfaces. The rendering time of the isosurfaces is reduced by approximating the visibility of the intersected volume cells from a predefined set of viewpoints. Experiments showed that rendering speedups of 2 to 5 times are achieved on MRI and CT datasets.