An efficient out-of-core volume ray casting method for the visualization of large medical data sets

Volume ray casting algorithm is widely recognized for high quality volume visualization. However, when rendering very large volume data sets, the original ray casting algorithm will lead to very inefficient random accesses in disk and make it very slowly to render the whole volume data set. In order to solve this problem, an efficient out-of-core volume ray casting method with a new out-of-core framework for processing large volume data sets based on consumer PC hardware is proposed in this paper. The new framework gives a transparent and efficient access to the volume data set cached in disk, while the new volume ray casting method minimizes the data exchange between hard disk and physical memory and performs comparatively fast high quality volume rendering. The experimental results indicate that the new method and framework are effective and efficient for the visualization of very large medical data sets.

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