Conclusion

We have presented different techniques for volume visualization of large datasets on commodity hardware. We have shown that efficient memory management is fundamental to achieve high performance. Our work on parallelization has demonstrated that well-known methods for large parallel systems can be adapted and extended to exploit evolving technologies, such as Simultanous Multithreading. Our memory efficient data structures provide frames per second performance even for large datasets. A key point of our work was to demonstrate that commodity hardware is able to achieve the performance necessary for real-world medical applications. In future work, we will investigate out-of-core and compression methods to permit the use of even larger datasets.