Patent ID: 7154500

Claim:
A method for interactive volume rendering of substantial amounts of volume data in form of a stack of original 2-dimensional slices into displayable images on a display of a personal computer, said personal computer having at least one graphics processing unit, comprising: reconstructing a 3-dimensional texture map of said volume data from processed 2-dimensional slices taken from said original 2-dimensional slices; segmenting said 3-dimensional texture map into three stacks of 3-dimensional-textured slices; rescaling said 3-dimensional-textured slices so that each slice edge dimension is of an integer power of two to yield rescaled 2-dimensional slices; subdividing each said rescaled 2-dimensional slice into grids of blocks with corresponding depth and texture coordinate information; in response to input designating view and size of image display of said volume data, carrying out selected transformations, including at least translation, rotation, scaling and plane-clipping, on said grids of blocks; performing a two-pass rendering process on said grids of blocks comprising a virtual rendering pass in order to compute information of view-dependent unused blocks, and a main rendering pass in order to obtain processed blocks for further filtration; and applying block-based fragment filtration to the processed blocks to obtain image elements suited for display and to render a final image.