Patent ID: 8466916

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of volume rendering a digitized medical image comprising the steps of: providing a digitized medical image volume, said image comprising a plurality of intensities represented as a 3-dimensional grid of points; providing a projection plane comprising a 2-dimensional lattice of points onto which rendering rays are projected from a viewing point through said image volume; advancing a sampling point along a ray through said image volume; using the position of the viewing point to automatically generate an incision region within said image volume, wherein said incision region has a fixed position and orientation with respect to the viewing point and viewing orientation, wherein said incision region is generated without segmenting said image volume; determining whether said sampling point is within said incision region, wherein a first transfer function is applied to a sample value interpolated from a first volume if said sampling point is within the incision region, and a second transfer function is applied to a sample value interpolated from a second volume if said sampling point is outside the incision region; and accumulating the output of the transfer function, wherein said steps of advancing a sampling point, generating an incision region, determining whether said sampling point is within said incision region, and accumulating the output are performed by a graphics processing unit.