Real-time display and manipulation of 3-D medical objects: The voxel processor architecture
Samuel M. Goldwasser, Roger Reynolds · Computer Vision Graphics and Image Processing · 1987
The fundamental problems associated with the interactive display, manipulation, and editing of three-dimensional (3-D) objects obtained from medical imaging systems such as CT, PET, and MRI are addressed. Software, hardware, and firmware techniques for shaded graphics display of medical objects are described and evaluated in terms of flexibility and performance. A special purpose multiprocessor architecture (the Voxel Processor architecture) developed specifically for medical research, clinical diagnosis, and surgical planning is presented. The Voxel Processor implements a shaded graphics display system with rotation, scaling, translation, slice planes and tone scale transformations on gray-scale data in true real time. The high-speed image generation algorithms exploit the ability to partition object space and require only simple arithmetic and logical operations. Minimal preprocessing steps are required to prepare object data for the Voxel Processor, and the data are always readily accessible for analysis or editing. The architecture is highly structured and is ideally suited for VLSI implementation.