Fast Volume Rendering for Medical Image Data

Volume rendering is a technique for visualizing 3D images from 2D sampled data. For 2D medical image data, volume rendering can be used to construct the corresponding 3D images, and physicians can then use them for more precise diagnoses. In this paper, we use some speed-up methods to fast construct the 3D images. After the construction, one can use our system for real-time rotation and simulated surgery of the 3D images. The data used by our system are from the human body MRI provided by National Yang-Ming University. The goal of this project is to build the “visible human ” database in Taiwan. On a Pentium II 300 PC, the speed in rotating a 3D image is 1.14 seconds per frame from 55 slices of 256x256 “full body ” MRI images. 1