Interactive Visualization of 3D Medical Image Data

1. Introduction Over the past fifteen years the field has progressed from coarse 3D computer graphic renderings to high quality 3D visualizations of medical image data. The rendering times for creating these images have also significantly decreased from periods of days in 1980 to tens of seconds on standard workstations in 1992. However, very limited clinical use has been made of 3D renderings at this time. Probably the most significant reason for this is the lack of interactive user control of the renderings. 3D visualizations hold great promise if the user can interactively segment and classify the data, and interactively choose viewpoint and rendering parameters to optimally visualize information present in the datasets.