| Three-dimensional medical image visualization is an important investigative and diagnostic tool in medicine. In addition to being a powerful diagnostic tool, it already plays a crucial role in several procedures including surgical simulation, image guided surgery and virtual endoscopy.;This thesis presents several new techniques that leverage the new features in modern commodity graphics hardware to improve the performance, quality and realism of real-time medical image visualization.;The enormous computations involved in interactively visualizing a medical dataset have always been a barrier to its full utilization in clinical practice. Thankfully, recent advancements in commodity programmable graphics hardware allow for not only interactive visualization, but superior image quality and shading options that are beginning to rival custom medical workstations and even sophisticated offline software techniques. |
