Hardware-Accelerated Volume Rendering for Real-Time Medical Data Visualization

Volumetric data rendering has become an important tool in various medical procedures as it allows the unbiased visualization of fine details of volumetric medical data (CT, MRI, fMRI). However, due to the large amount of computation involved, the rendering time increases dramatically as the size of the data set grows. This paper presents several acceleration techniques of volume rendering using general-purpose GPU. Some techniques enhance the rendering speed of software ray casting based on voxels’ opacity information, while the others improve traditional hardware-accelerated object-order volume rendering. Remarkable speedups are observed using the proposed GPU-based algorithm from experiments on routine medical data sets.