Interactive surgical planning: High-speed object rendition and manipulation without specialized hardware

Algorithms for high-speed visualization and manipulation of high-resolution medical objects are described. Central to these algorithms is a novel method of object representation, called a semi-boundary, which stores boundary voxels of the object as a row-indexed list, along with a code associated with each voxel that indicates which of its neighbors are outside the object and which are inside. The algorithms for manipulation take as input a semi-boundary and produce either a depiction or a new semi-boundary of the altered object. Rendering speeds normally obtainable only on systems with specialized hardware design have been achieved on general-purpose workstations entirely through optimum algorithms. The potential use of the methodology in surgical planning is illustrated