3D ultrasound imaging is an emerging and prospective modality in the ultrasound scanning area. Since 3D ultrasound dat are often acquired by translation or rotation of 2D data acquisition systems, the data can be directly sampled on cylindrical or spherical structured girds rather tan on rectilinear grids. However, visualization of cylindrical or spherical data is more complex than that of rectilinear grids. Therefore, conventional rendering methods resample the grids into rectilinear grids and visualize the resampled rectilinear dat. However, resampling introduces an undesired resolution loss. In this paper a direct rendering scheme of cylindrical ultrasound data is considered. Even though cell sin cylindrical grids have different sizes, they are very similar in shape and contain some regularity. We use this similarity and regularity of cells to reduce rendering time in a projection-based rendering method. To achieve high sped rendering, we prose a simple projection ordering method and a fast projection method using a common edge table. And also, to produce good rendering results, an efficient bilinear interpolation scheme is prosed for the hexahedral projection. In this scheme, since weighting coefficients are calculated in the image plane, we can avoid calculating crossing point sin the object space. Based on the proposed techniques above, we can produce high resolution rendered images directly form a cylindrical 3D ultrasound data set.
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