Patent ID: 8497861

Claim:
A method for rendering with a processor a deformable 3D volumetric voxel dataset obtained from an imaging device, comprising: the processor dividing the deformable 3D volumetric voxel dataset into a hierarchical tree prior to determining a viewing direction, the hierarchical tree specified by a plurality of contiguous cubic bricks in a plurality of texture data, each one of the bricks being subdivided into a plurality of contiguous cubic blocks of data with a position index encoding the positions of the blocks within the deformable 3D volumetric voxel dataset, wherein each block that is not further partitioned is a leaf block; the processor creating a neighborhood data structure for each leaf block in the hierarchical tree, wherein the neighborhood data structure includes for each leaf block a reference to all bricks neighboring the leaf block; the processor determining for each leaf block in the tree hierarchical structure a set of a minimum and a maximum value of the voxels in the leaf block and storing the set; the processor creating for each leaf block a first and a second array, the first array containing an identification of a texture of a brick in the neighborhood structure of the leaf block, the second array containing corresponding indices determining a position of a brick in the deformable 3D volumetric voxel dataset; the processor fetching from a video memory a deformation vector according to a current position of a sample in the deformable 3D volumetric voxel dataset; the processor adding the deformation vector to the current position of the sample to determine a deformation index related to a deformation position of the sample in the plurality of texture data; the processor searching the second array for the deformation index and determining an array index; the processor fetching the identification of the texture of the brick from the first array based on the array index; the processor fetching a value from the texture identified based on the texture identification from the first array at the deformation position; and the processor rendering the sample according to the value fetched in the previous step to render the deformable 3D volumetric voxel dataset as a deformed 3D volumetric voxel dataset without deforming the plurality of texture data.