Three-dimensional medical imaging equipment such as CT,MRI and PET produces a sequence of 2-dimensional slices.Each slice represents on cross-section of a patient's organ.To help medical diagnosis it is often required to generate the 3-dimensional images of the objects from a sequence of slices.However such operation is extermely computation and data intensive.In this paper we present a parallel algorithm for visualizing such a sequence of medical slices.The algorthm takes advantage of the slice structure of the input data and uses a special slit-light source for ray tracing.This greatly simplifies the parallelization yet still yields good image quality.Furthermore,unlike the similar work in this area,our parallel program is both efficient and architecture-independent.The same source code works equally well on the distributed-memory machines,the shared-memory machines as well as the networks of workstations.This is achieved by using a radically different parallel programming method -- the Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model.
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