Ray casting in the BCC grid applied to 3D medical image visualization

Presents a ray casting algorithm in the BCC grid. This grid is important in medical imaging applications due to its outstanding topological properties and its higher contents of symmetries. BCC grid is the optimal sampling grid in 3-D space, it is the best grid to apply mathematical morphology process and recently it has been used in tomographic image reconstruction methods. Nevertheless, its use is not widespread due to lack of signal processing algorithms and adapted software tools. This paper provides a way of performing volume rendering on the BCC grid. The authors have developed a general algorithm to trace discrete straight lines in any n-dimensional grid. A particular implementation for the BCC grid is shown here and applied to volume rendering of medical images