Region of interest and multiresolution for volume rendering

Medical image interpretation is facing an important challenge resulting from the continuously increasing amount of imaging data. Innovations in medical image visualization are necessary to assist the radiologist in interacting and navigating effectively large multidimensional imaging sets. We propose a novel wavelet splatting approach for multiresolution 3-D visualization. Our method renders the context with a low resolution at first, and then subsequently, refines it progressively to attain full resolution, while ensuring that a specific region of interest is rendered at full resolution at all times. It is based on the splatting approach for its computational efficiency and uses the localization property of the wavelet transform to simultaneously render a full-resolution region of interest with a coarser context. Lighting calculations are used in the preprocessing stage to enhance the quality of the visualization. A special data structure that is based on a zero-tree model is used to manipulate the region of interest more easily. The speed-up achieved reaches a factor of 30 compared to the time needed to display the full-resolution data. By achieving effective 3-D rendering, we bring an element of solution to the problem of the image overload.