Hardware-accelerated dynamic volume rendering for real-time surgical simulation

We developed a direct volume rendering technique, that supports low latency real time visual feedback in parallel with physical simulation on commodity graphics platforms. In our approach, a fast approximation of the diffuse shading equation is computed on the fly by the graphics pipe-line directly from the scalar data. We do this by exploiting the possibilities offered by multi-texturing with the register combiner OpenGL extension, that provides a configurable means to determine per-pixel fragment coloring. The effectiveness of our approach, that supports a full decoupling of simulation and rendering, is demonstrated in a training system for temporal bone surgery.2004-09-20Conference held in Colima, Mexico, September 20-21, 2004Workshop in Virtual Reality Interactions and Physical Simulations (VRIPHYS 2004