Hardware-accelerated dynamic volume rendering for real--time surgical simulation

We developed a direct volume rendering technique, that supports low latency real time visual feedback in parallel with physical simulation on commodity graphics platforms. In our approach, a fast approximation of the diffuse shading equation is computed on the fly by the graphics pipe-line directly from the scalar data. We do this by exploiting the possibilities offered by multi-texturing with the register combiner OpenGL extension, that provides a configurable means to determine per-pixel fragment coloring. The effectiveness of our approach, that supports a full decoupling of simulation and rendering, is demonstrated in a training system for temporal bone surgery.

@InProceedings{AGGZZ04a,
  author       = {Agus, M. and Giachetti, A. and Gobbetti, E. and Zanetti, G. and Zorcolo, A.},
  title        = {Hardware-accelerated dynamic volume rendering for real--time surgical simulation},
  booktitle    = {Workshop in Virtual Reality Interactions and Physical Simulations (VRIPHYS 2004)},
  month        = {september},
  year         = {2004},
  note         = {Conference held in Colima, Mexico, September 20-21, 2004},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2004/AGGZZ04a},
}