3D virtual colonoscopy with real-time volume rendering

In our previous work, we developed a virtual colonoscopy system on a high-end 16-processor SGI Challenge with an expensive hardware graphics accelerator. The goal of this work is to port the system to a low cost PC in order to increase its availability for mass screening. Recently, Mitsubishi Electric has developed a volume-rendering PC board, called VolumePro, which includes 128 MB of RAM and vg500 rendering chip. The vg500 chip, based on Cube-4 technology, can render a 2563 volume at 30 frames per second. High image quality of volume rendering inside the colon is guaranteed by the full lighting model and 3D interpolation supported by the vg500 chip. However, the VolumePro board is lacking some features required by our interactive colon navigation. First, VolumePro currently does not support perspective projection which is paramount for interior colon navigation. Second, the patient colon data is usually much larger than 2563 and cannot be rendered in real-time. In this paper, we present our solutions to these problems, including simulated perspective projection and axis aligned boxing techniques, and demonstrate the high performance of our virtual colonoscopy system on low cost PCs.