3-dimensional rendering of MR (magnetic resonance) images

The authors deal with the perspective display of skin, skull, and brain surfaces from magnetic resonance (MR) head image data. To achieve the three-dimensional (3-D) rendering of MR images, the thresholding method and Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) edge detector were employed to detect edges involved in the pictures. An automatic tracking scheme was also devised to extract the tissue boundaries from the detected edges. An existing surface shading method, called gradient shading, was implemented to display the extracted boundaries.