Hardware Assisted Multichannel Volume Rendering

We explore real time volume rendering of multichannel data for volumes with color and multi-modal information. We demonstrate volume rendering of the Visible Human Male color dataset and photo-realistic rendering of voxelized terrains, and achieve high quality visualizations. We render multi-modal volumes utilizing hardware programmability for accumulation level mixing, and use CT and MRI information as examples. We also use multi-board parallel/distributed rendering schemes for large datasets and investigate scalability issues. We employ the VolumePro 1000 for real time multichannel volume rendering. Our approach, however, is not hardware-specific and can use commodity texture hardware instead.