Abstract
Although the volume rendering (VR) was well used to the three-dimensional medical image, it is difficult to use VR for the surgery simulation and the tele-operation support, because the amount of data reconstructed using VR is enormous. Surface rendering (SR) is effective than VR in there because a vivid 3D medical image can be reconstructed using SR, and moreover the amount of data reconstructed using SR can be reduced very much if a suitable polygon reduction algorithm is used. In this paper, polygon reduction methods were discussed, and a new polygon reduction algorithm was proposed. This reduction algorithm is effective to the triangle surface data, such as the surface data reconstructed by the Marching Cubes and the various improved Marching Cubes algorithms.
