Fast maximum intensity projection algorithm using shear warp factorization and reduced resampling

Maximal intensity projection (MIP) is routinely used to view MRA and other volumetric angiographic data. The straightforward implementation of MIP is ray casting that traces a volumetric data set in a computationally expensive manner. This article reports a fast MIP algorithm using shear warp factorization and reduced resampling that drastically reduced the redundancy in the computations for projection, thereby speeding up MIP by more than 10 times.