Visualization of both bony and soft-tissue structures generated from serial sections produced by computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) is an important tool now employed to improve orthopedic surgery and many other medical procedures, including both diagnostic and surgical. Visualization in real-time, i.e., instantaneous presentation of any three dimensional view upon demand of the user, requires expensive computer graphics workstations. The applicant has received a patent on a new computing structure for surface rendering based on a novel scheme based on using surface normals in the FCC (Face-Centered-Cubic) tessellation employing multiported memory. This should permit real-time surface rendering at from 10 to 100 million voxels per second. Discussions with another small business, Visual Information Technologies, Inc. (Plano, Texas) which is an image-processing VLSI chip design house, indicates that a carefully planned research program on both system and chip design optimization could reduce this new computing structure to a single chip. One or more of these chips could then become the heart of an inexpensive (less than $1000.) plugin board for the Apple Macintosh or similar computing platform. The proposed research would include studies of: (1) design tradeoffs of the architecture of the FCC lookup tables and the three-dimensional bit-slice image memory units; (2) all aspects of voxel value routing and I/O; (3) the choice of the host computer; (4) methods for overlaying the computed graylevel data into refresh memory; and (5) market opportunities which would properly marry the research on the patented processor with current national and international needs in three-dimensional surface rendering.
