[Fast extraction of iso-surface in surface rendering of medical images]

In this paper a new direct volume rendering method is presented for fast extraction of iso-surface by adopting the idea from the Shear-Warp algorithm. By creating the sorted volumetric data from the original volume data and specifying a value range of data which determines the part of the sorted volumetric data traversed, the amount of volume data traversed would be reduced obviously and the extraction operation of iso-surface would be very fast. In addition, we can adjust the value range to obtain the different rendering speed and image quality according to the purpose in application. Moreover, the proposed algorithm will not output any intermediate data after the sorted volumetric data being produced. Therefore, it is possible to realize the rapid 3D surface reconstruction for medical images on the personal computer without the support of any hardware accelerator.