Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 874517, 5 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/874517
Research Article

Plane-Based Sampling for Ray Casting Algorithm in Sequential Medical Images

Lili Lin,1 Shengyong Chen,1 Yan Shao,2 and Zichun Gu2

1School of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China
2Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, Medical College, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310016, China

Received 9 December 2012; Accepted 28 December 2012

Academic Editor: Carlo Cattani

Copyright © 2013 Lili Lin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper proposes a plane-based sampling method to improve the traditional Ray Casting Algorithm (RCA) for the fast reconstruction of a three-dimensional biomedical model from sequential images. In the novel method, the optical properties of all sampling points depend on the intersection points when a ray travels through an equidistant parallel plan cluster of the volume dataset. The results show that the method improves the rendering speed at over three times compared with the conventional algorithm and the image quality is well guaranteed.