Elliptical splats based isosurface visualization for volume data

Elliptical splats are used to represent and render the isosurface of volume data. The method consists of two steps. The first step is to extract points on the isosurface by looking up the case table. In the second step, properties of splats are computed based on local geometry. Rendering is achieved using surface splatting algorithm. The obtained results show that the extraction time of isosurfaces can be reduced by a factor of three. So our approach is more appropriate for interactive visualization of large medical data than the classical marching cubes (MC) technique.