Region-restricted model for fast volume rendering to interactively change visualized objects
✍ Scribed by Michio Oikawa; Koichi Sano; Yoshiaki Isobe
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 257 KB
- Volume
- 31
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0882-1666
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✦ Synopsis
With the objective of advanced medical diagnostic support based on understanding the three-dimensional structure of the region being diagnosed, volume data measured by X-ray computed tomography (CT) and three-dimensional images obtained by volume rendering are increasingly being used. To present useful information about the region being diagnosed, functions to display the fine structure and to interactively select the information to be visualized are needed. Interactive operation has been difficult because the processing time was too long in volume rendering based on the conventional high-image-quality image-order approach. Conventional acceleration techniques to improve interactivity could not be run on thin clients because of their huge memory consumption and had problems such as degraded image quality. In this paper, we propose a region-restricted model which uses the fact that transparent voxels do not affect the projection plane to implement fast interactive rendering with low memory consumption and no image degradation. In addition, we propose data structures to reduce the accesses to volume data. The proposed algorithm was applied to real data and compared to the shearwarp algorithm, which is a conventional acceleration technique. The ability to achieve the same processing speed while requiring less than one-third the memory in the calculations was verified.