A PC-based high-quality and interactive virtual endoscopy navigating system using 3D texture based volume rendering

As an alternative method to optical endoscopy, visual quality and interactivity are crucial for virtual endoscopy. One solution is to use the 3D texture map based volume rendering method that offers high rendering speed without reducing visual quality. However, it is difficult to apply the method to virtual endoscopy. First, 3D texture mapping requires a high-end graphic workstation. Second, texture memory limits reduce the frame-rate. Third, lack of shading reduces visual quality significantly. As 3D texture mapping has become available on personal computers recently, we developed an interactive navigation system using 3D texture mapping on a personal computer. We divided the volume data into small cubes and tested whether the cubes had meaningful data. Only the cubes that passed the test were loaded into the texture memory and rendered. With the amount of data to be rendered minimized, rendering speed increased remarkably. We also improved visual quality by implementing full Phong shading based on the iso-surface shading method without sacrificing interactivity. With the developed navigation system, 256 x 256 x 256 sized brain MRA data was interactively explored with good image quality.