Patent ID: RE42638

Claim:
A digital electronic system for real-time volume rendering of a 3D volume dataset comprising: a data-processing accelerator for reducing a number of voxels for rendering an image in real-time by selecting image-forming voxels that are non-transparent and non-occluded from a projection and by rejecting non-image-forming voxels that are transparent or occluded from the projection, wherein the voxels are a volume dataset of the image to be rendered contained in memory external to the system; a control unit for forward projecting the 3D volume dataset at regularly spaced voxel positions to determine number of rays to be casted wherein said 3D volume dataset is divided into a plurality of voxel access blocks having a cubic array of voxel; a processor for ray casting the rays of the image-forming voxels in a front-to-back order to form 2D representation of image planes; a hardware engine for accelerating the real-time volume rendering by having the image-forming voxels available for processing without having to refetch a substantial number of the voxels from the external memory; wherein the real-time image is rendered from the image-planes formed from the selected voxels.