20 years of volume rendering

Abstract

In the year 2007 we celebrate the 20-th anniversary of coining the notion of volume rendering, followed by its first "official" usage in the papers by Levoy and by Drebin, Carpenter and Hanrahan in 1988. The new and revolutionary introduced by these papers was the possibility to visualize objects represented by discrete threedimensional scalar fields-usually tomographic scans-without the necessity to fit any surface models to the objects represented therein. This new approach conceptually simplified sequence of the required rendering operations-the rendering pipeline, and enabled to keep the important connection between the original three-dimensional input data and the final renditions. Thus, a possibility of high quality rendering of complex structures emerged, not limited just to objects with well defined surfaces but also to those with diffused, blurred and weakly defined boundaries in general.In this overview a brief sketch of the volume rendering history is given, with an emphasis on the most important developments in the areas of the basic algorithms and their accelerated modifications, object and tissue specification techniques by transfer functions and segmentation and rendering of complex multiobject scenes.

Microstructural analysis on the testicular cyst of the wolf spider by 3D volume rendering

“…Numerous methodologies for 3D volume rendering have been developed and applied in the field of medicine and biology (Šrámek ). 3D rendering has been widely used to examine the central nervous system and several rendered brain models and respective protocols have been developed (Rohlfing et al .…”