Surface Rendering for Multi-axial Cross Sections
Ming‐Dar Tsai, Ming‐Shium Hsieh · 2001
This study presents, for the first time, an automatic algorithm for surface rendering of a volume consisting of multi-axial cross sections. In computer graphics, although a medical volume is usually considered to consist of sequential parallel cross sections, multi-axial parallel sections that constitute a multi-axial volume have also been fre-quently used in recent clinical cases. Herein, a multi-axial volume is assumed to consist of multiple one-axial subvolumes occupying the same space. The discrete ray tracing algorithm that searches for only a hit voxel in a conventional one-axial volume is ex-tended to search for multiple hit voxels in a multi-axial volume. Quadratic isosurfaces reconstructed from the hit voxels are used to approximate the object surface. The ren-dering results, applied to clinical cases to improve diagnostic rates, indicate that 3D im-ages obtained by applying our methods to multi-axial volumes are more clinically useful than those obtained from one-axial volumes.