Patent ID: 7893938

Claim:
A method of processing medical image data for smooth rendering from a defined point of view of one or more anatomical structures with a nearby surrounding area from 3D image data, wherein the one or more anatomical structures are separated from the nearby surrounding area, comprising: creating an image by rendering with a processor the one or more separated anatomical structures from the defined point of view and saving a depth information of the rendered anatomical structures in a first Z-buffer with non-visible pixels set to value 1 and saving the rendered image of the anatomical structures; extracting a boundary between the rendered one or more anatomical structures and the nearby surrounding area using the depth information of the rendered one or more anatomical structures; rendering the nearby surrounding area from the defined point of view, including the steps of extracting from the first Z-buffer the pixels that lie on a boundary between visible and non-visible areas, storing each boundary pixel's image coordinates in a 2D array, adding four points to the 2D array as defined by a visualization frustum; creating a 2D mesh as defined by the 2D array points; and projecting the 2D mesh to a 3D mesh by assigning to each point defining the 2D mesh its corresponding 3D coordinate, and combining the renderings of the one or more anatomical structures and the nearby surrounding area to be displayed on a display.