Interactive voxel surface rendering in medical applications

Semi-boundary (SB) data structure is a compact voxel surface representation of the structure from the medical images. It represents only the boundary of the extracted structure and only an opaque object boundary involved in a 3D dataset can be visualized. Its computational complexity is in proportion to the number of SB voxels. In this paper, we propose schemes to reduce the number of projections in two ways. First, in conjunction with neighboring code, we exploit a set of visibility tables to cull some of the invisible SB voxels. Second, we exploit three pass rotations and an incremental approach to quickly determine the projection position for each SB voxel during rendering. With these two combinations, we significantly improve SB rendering performance. As a result, we can achieve an interactive rendering speed on general purpose workstations for our medical applications.