E-Shell Rendering

In medical imaging, shell rendering is considered one of the most efficient and effective methods for volume visualization. It requires a compact data structure of voxels and uses the voxel splatting technique for surface and volume rendering. In order to avoid holes in the rendition, the size of the voxels are usually made bigger than the size of the pixels for voxel splatting. In such a case, we have identified a conceptual problem in shell rendering which affects the correctness and quality of the renditions. We discuss this problem and propose a solution, which improves image quality without affecting the speed of the method. The new approach is called E-Shell Rendering (extended-shell rendering). It requires an extension of the shell data structure and a variant of the original algorithm. We illustrate and discuss the results with examples created by surface and volume rendering.