Mastering interactive surface rendering for Java-based diagnostic applications

The display of iso-surfaces in medical data sets is an important visualization technique used by radiologists for the diagnosis of volumetric density data sets. The demands put by radiologists on such a display technique are interactivity, multiple stacked transparent surfaces and cutting planes that allow an interactive clipping of the surfaces. This paper presents a Java based, platform independent implementation of a very fast surface rendering algorithm which combines the advantages of explicit surface representation, splatting, and shear-warp projection to fulfill all these requirements. The algorithm is implemented within the context of J-Vision, an application for viewing and diagnosing medical images which is currently in use at various hospitals.