Ray grouping based ray casting for visualization of medical data

Three dimensional visualization of medical volume data is achieved by many of the volume rendering algorithms either Direct or Indirect. The focus of our work is to make some simplifications in the Ray casting algorithm, a Direct Volume Rendering technique. The idea is to group the rays that are cast from similar voxels and the groups are verified for similarity on every successive sampling. This paper also compares the results with those results generated by the traditional ray casting in order ensure image quality. As the rays are cast in groups, the computational complexity of the rendering algorithm is reduced due to the decrease in the total number of samples being actually processed.