A block-based volume rendering scheme for the spine biopsy simulator

Volume rendering is a powerful tool for visualizing sampled scalar values from 3D data without fitting geometric primitives to the data. However, the size of volume data is usually too big to handle in real time. Recently, various volume rendering algorithms have been proposed in order to reduce the rendering time. However, most of the proposed algorithms are not proper for large volume data, which is required in some applications such as the spine biopsy simulator. In this paper, we propose a block-based fast volume rendering algorithm using shear-warp factorization. The algorithm performs volume rendering by using information of organ segmentation as well as 3D volume data, which is a common environment in the spine biopsy simulator. The proposed block-based algorithm can reduce storage requirement and increase the rendering speed by treating the 3D data on a block-by-block basis. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by rendering 3D body images obtained from X-ray CT (computed tomograph) system.