Incremental volume reconstruction and rendering for 3-D ultrasound imaging

In this paper, we present approaches toward an interactive visualization of a real time input, applied to 3-D visualizations of 2-D ultrasound echography data. The first, 3 degrees-of- freedom (DOF) incremental system visualizes a 3-D volume acquired as a stream of 2-D slices with location and orientation with 3 DOF. As each slice arrives, the system reconstructs a regular 3-D volume and renders it. Rendering is done by an incremental image-order ray- casting algorithm which stores and reuses the results of expensive resampling along the rays for speed. The second is our first experiment toward real-time 6 DOF acquisition and visualization. Two-dimensional slices with 6 DOF are reconstructed off-line, and visualized at an interactive rate using a parallel volume rendering code running on the graphics multicomputer Pixel-Planes 5.

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