Interactive volume data rendering for medical VR applications

Volume visualization is rapidly becoming the preferred tool for the estimation of anatomical features for volume modalities such as MRI, CT or 3-D ultrasound. Although traditional volume visualization systems provide quite adequate results they are not applicable for interactive VR applications. Since volume visualization implies processing of an enormous amount of data, this technique usually leads to insufficient frame rates. To counteract these drawbacks, a dedicated hardware or super-computer for rendering in real-time is used quite frequently. This paper presents an approach usind 3-D textures and standard rendering hardware, which allows real-time rendering of volume and polygonal data in VR applications. The proposed environment enables the user to navigate through - and interact with - the VR scene, which combines volume and surface model data sets.