T-shell rendering

Previously shell rendering was shown to be an ultra fast method of rendering digital surfaces represented as sets of voxels. The purpose of this work is to describe a new extension to the shell rendering method that creates isosurfaces called t-shells using triangulated shell elements. The great speed of the shell rendering technique is made available through the use of data structures that describe the shell and through algorithms that traverse this information to produce the 2D projection of the 3D data. In traditional shell rendering, each shell element is a triple comprised of the offset from the start of the row, the neighborhood code, and the surface normal. We modify this data structure by replacing the neighborhood code with a code that indicates the configuration of triangles within that area. The t-shell algorithm modifies the original shell rendering algorithm to project 1 of the 256 possible triangulated configurations (rather than the rasterization of a single, uniform shell element). We present the general t-shell algorithm as well as the results of two preliminary implementations as applied to input data which consist of different object from various parts of the body and various modalities with a variety of surface sizes and shapes. We present the results of some initial timing experiments as well as some preliminary, sample renditions.