Volume Visualization in Magnetic Resonance Angiography

Abstract

1 Volume Visualization In order to achieve a more natural presentation of tomographic volume data, volume visualization techniques have been developed which provide threedimensional (3D) views of the organs of interest. These techniques have proven clinically useful in fields such as craniofacial surgery or orthopedics. In our experience, voxel-based methods such as the ray casting algorithm which we use in our VOXEL-MAN visualization system are best suited for interactive exploration of medical volume data, because all information is kept during the rendering process. As shown by Hohne et al. [2], segmentation or visualization parameters can thus easily be changed. Applied to MRA data, it turns out that aliasing effects which can be largely ignored in visualizing larger objects result in some strong artifacts. The grid for resampling the volume for 3D projection is often chosen to have the same width as the original data. In this case, however, the s