Techniques and software architectures for medical visualisation and image processing

This work presents an extension of shell rendering that is more flexible and yields higher quality volume renderings. Shell rendering consists of efficient data-structures and methods to manipulate and render structures with non-precise boundaries in volume data. We have updated these algorithms by creating an implementation that makes effective use of ubiquitously available commercial graphics hardware. More significantly, we have extended the algorithm to make use of elliptical Gaussian splats instead of straight-forward voxel projection. This dramatically increases the quality of the renderings, especially with anisotropically sampled volumes. The use of the graphics hardware alleviates the performance penalty of using splats.