ABSTRACT
Objective: When the region of interest is somewhere in the middle of the volumetric data, it will be occluded by other regions of the volumetric data and will be hard to see in the reconstruction of volume rendering. In order to provide doctor with comprehensive, visual and accurate diagnostic information, fast volume dipping of medical images on GPU is proposed in the paper. Methods: The rapid volume clipping is achieved by combining the dipping algorithm with the fast volume rendering algorithm based on GPU. The technique is based on fast volume tendering of medical images on GPU. It works as follows: The space information of the section plane is sent to the shader. Then compare the position of the volume data sets with the section plane to decide whether the data is clipped or not. Our algorithm is different from the algorithm that clipping based on depth stencil. We can see the result that reconstructed from the data sets that remained from any position as long as the section plane is defined. Results: According to the shape the users defined, our algorithm can decide which parts of the volume have to be clipped. Because of using the general graphics hardware acecleration, the proposed method achieves interactive display rate. Conclusions: The experiment shows that the algorithm is significantly fast and can meet the requirements of real-time interactive rendering on the premise of ensuring imaging quality and can be used in surgery simulation and so on.