Patent ID: 7889194

Claim:
A method of fusing a multi-planar reconstruction of a digitized medical image with a volume rendering of a digitized medical image comprising the steps of: providing a digitized medical image volume, said image comprising a plurality of intensities on a 3-dimensional grid of points; providing a planar region inside said image volume in which a multi-planar reconstruction (MPR) will be rendered in a first rendering pass; sampling the neighborhood about each point in said planar region wherein a color value for each said point and a depth of each said point within the image volume are saved in a buffer, wherein said MPR is rendered into said buffer; 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, to render said image volume in a second rendering pass; advancing a sampling point along a ray through said image volume; computing a depth of said sampling point in said image volume; determining for a sampling point on a ray that penetrates said planar region if a depth of said sampling point is less than the buffer depth of a corresponding point in said planar region and sampling a neighborhood of points about such a sampling point; determining if said sampling point is near said planar region, wherein a first transfer function is applied to a sample value interpolated from a first volume if said sampling point is close to or inside the planar region, and a second transfer function is applied to a sample value interpolated from a second volume if said sampling point is not close to the planar region; and accumulating the output of the transfer function at a point on said projection plane, wherein said image volume is rendered and fused with the MPR from said first rendering pass.