Distributed parallel volume rendering applied to virtual endoscopy

Improved realism in virtual endoscopy may be achieved by using volume rather than surface rendering, which preserves grayscale information and fine detail from the original CT dataset. Since volume rendering is computationally intensive, parallelization of the calculations is attractive. A distributed parallel rendering algorithm has been applied to calculation of volume rendered cine sequences in a few seconds per frame when using a modest number of readily available workstations.