MATLAB-based fourier volume rendering framework

Volume rendering plays a significant role in medical imaging. It allows exploring the internal structures of volumetric data acquired by the different imaging modalities. This exploration allows accurate diagnosis and consequently effective treatment. Various volume rendering techniques exists. However, compared to other techniques, Fourier volume rendering has gained a wide acceptance by the radiologists for several reasons. This technique generates attenuation renderings similar to x-ray radiographs that are well interpreted by the physicians. Additionally, it works with time complexity of O(N²logN), and thus, it delivers interactive frame rates for large scale medical volumes in comparison with spatial-domain rendering techniques. The complexity associated with developing a basic rendering pipeline for this technique hinders medical imaging scientists from focusing their research on investigating new algorithms for improving the reconstruction quality of the resulting digital radiographs. In this paper, we present a flexible, extensible and semi-interactive high-level MATLAB-based framework for the Fourier volume rendering pipeline.