Practice and experience: Interactive rendering of the colonic environment on PC-platforms

The virtual colonoscopy technique is a non-invasive technique used to generate high resolution video views of the colon interior structure. The colonic structure consists of a great number of triangle meshes that challenge rendering performance. In contrast to previous work, the proposed approaches allow interactive colonic surface rendering on low-cost PC systems. Our system takes advantage of the following concepts: PVS, LOD and image caching. Initially, the colon structure is partitioned into many cells based on curvature of the centerline. During rendering, only triangles contained in PVS are considered for rendering. To further improve rendering performance, each cell is represented by multi-resolutions of triangular mesh or cached images. We present an adaptive approach used to automatically switch LOD/image caching and yield interactive rendering performance with acceptable realism on low-cost PC platforms.