A fast progressive method of maximum intensity projection

Real-time processing and visualization of the 3D image data are the most important requirements for medical imaging. Among various 3D visualization methods, maximum intensity projection (MIP) is a useful tool to visualize 3D medical images. However, a large computation amount is a drawback of using the MIP image in clinical diagnosis. The processing time of the MIP depends on the number of voxels of the 3D data. In order to overcome the large amount of computation for the NU, we have developed a progressive MIP method that can perform the MIP with low-resolution for fast processing, and use the low-resolution MIP image to generate a full-resolution MIP image with a reduced computation time. In this paper, the progressive MIP method is implemented and its computation complexity is analyzed. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.