Interactive Inner Structures Visualization in 3D Datasets

The simultaneous use of images obtained from different sources is common in medical diagnosis. But how to explore the information contents of these data sets is a problem. Real-time methods to directly convey the information contents of large volumetric scalar fields are still a challenge to the computer graphics, especially to large volumetric data sets. So in this paper a GPU based inner structures visualization method is proposed, which on the one hand for the interactive visual exploration of the data, and on the other hand for the generation of high-quality visual representations. The method takes as voxel models and constructs 3D textures, which exploits hardware-assisted texture mapping, re-samples volume data, represented as a stack of 3D texture, onto a sampling surface or so called proxy geometry. For each texel of a slice it perform a fetch to each 3D texture and performs fusion and shading using a fragment shader. The method is very fast and versatile and can provide a good insight into volume dataset.