Fast volume rendering for medical image

In orders to improve the rendering speed of ray casting and make this technique a practical routine in medical applications, two new and improved techniques are described in this paper. First, an integrated method using "proximity clouds" technique is applied to speed up ray casting. The second technique for speeding up the 3D rendering is done through a parallel implementation based on "single computer multi CPU" model Four groups of CT data sets have been used to validate the improvement of the rendering speed. The result shown that the interactive rendering speed is up to 6-10 fps, which is almost real-time making our algorithm practical in medical visualization routine.