Interactive voxel surface rendering in medical applications

Semi-boundary (SB) data structure is a compact voxel surface representation of the structure from the medical images. It represents only the boundary of the extracted structure and only an opaque object boundary involved in a 3D dataset can be visualized. Its computational complexity is in proportio n to the number of SE voxels. In this paper, we propose schemes to reduce t he number of projections in two ways. First, in conjunction with neighborin g code, we exploit a set of visibility tables to cull some of the invisible SE voxels. Second, we exploit three pass rotations and an incremental appr oach to quickly determine the projection position for each SE voxel during rendering. With these two combinations, we significantly improve SE renderi ng performance. As a result, we can achieve an interactive rendering speed on general purpose workstations for our medical applications. (C) 1999 Else vier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.