Visualization of Cardio-CT Data on Standard PC Hardware

Abstract

In the last years, texture based volume rendering on the PC platform has proven very successful. Many methods that could formerly only be done with software renderers can now be done completely by the graphics hardware. In this paper we present first results of our ongoing work that deals with the visualization of time dependent CT data of the human heart. We compare the drawbacks and benefits of 3D and 2D texture based methods. We also show that a high quality shaded rendering can considerably improve the visual quality. Then we present our results in the area of classification methods, especially using two-dimensional classification. Finally we demonstrate that it is possible to visualize a beating heart using moderately sized time dependent Cardio-CT data.