Improving image quality of volume-rendered three-dimensional medical data
Mark Bentum, Barthold Lichtenbelt, Mark A. Boer, Alex G. J. Nijmeijer, Marco K. Bosma, Jaap Smit · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
Volume visualization is the technique of displaying two dimensional projections of three dimensional data. The data is acquired from a medical scanner, like MRI, CT, SPECT, or US scanners. Visualizing a given three dimensional medical dataset can be done by surface rendering algorithms or by direct volume rendering algorithms. Surface rendering algorithms require an intermediate geometric representation and are therefore less attractive. In our approach volume rendering is used. To improve image quality of such projections of the volume data, special care should be taken to (a) the interpolation step, (b) the estimation of the local gradient and (c) the assignment of opacity values at sample positions. These aspects are addressed in this paper.