A Progressive Fast Volume Rendering for Medical Images

There are various 3D visualization methods such as volume rendering and surface renderingS The volume rendering (VR) is a useful tool to visualize 3D medical images. However, a requirement of large computation amount makes it difficult for the VR to be used in real-time medical applications. In order to overcome the large computation amount of the VR, we have developed a progressive VR (PVR) method that can perform the low-resolution VR for fast and intuitive processing and use the depth information from the low-resolution VR to generate the full-resolution VR image with a reduced computation time. The developed algorithm can be applicable to the real-time applications of the YR. Le., the low-resolution VR is performed interactively according to change of view direction, and the full-resolution VR is performed once we fix the view direction In this paper its computation complexity and image quality are analyzed Also an extension of its progressive refinement is introduced.