Abstract #2393

Peterson B, Hao X, Xu D

Visualization of 3D medical datasets is an effective way for us to understand the structure and functional relationships in the data, such as human brain and body. Indirect (surface-based) and direct volume (volume-based) display have their relative advantages as well as disadvantages. Indirect volume rendering is fast, whereas direct volume rendering can generate high quality images with subsurface details. Here we propose a novel volume visualization algorithm which combines the advantages of direct- and indirect-volume rendering. Our method can interactively render high-quality images with subsurface details without using expensive special-purpose graphics hardware. We achieve interactivity by pre-computing the volume radiance transfer and storing it with points on a desired isosurface.