Patent ID: 7190364

Claim:
A method for polygon-smoothing in texture-based rendering of a 3D volume of image data of an anatomical body part, comprising: receiving the 3D volume of image data; slicing the 3D volume of image data into a plurality of slice polygons; downsizing a slice polygon of the plurality of slice polygons and determining boundary polygons around the downsized slice polygon using a smoothing factor, wherein the downsized slice polygon comprises first vertices and the boundary polygons comprise second vertices; generating a falloff ramp between the first vertices of the downsized slice polygon and the second vertices of the boundary polygons; and rendering the downsized slice polygon with texture-based volume rendering and the boundary polygons with texture-based volume rendering and the falloff ramp by multiplying an alpha value of the downsized slice polygon with an alpha value of the falloff ramp.