Richard I. Hartley

System and method employing pipelined parallel circuit architecture for displaying surface structures of the interior region of a solid body

Arbitrary interior surfaces of a three-dimensional body are displayed from a regular array of values of at least one physical property in the interior of the body. The physical property measurements may be made with systems such as computerized tomographic x-ray, or magnetic resonance imaging. Highly parallel circuits and a highly parallel architecture permit generation of surface views in real time, i.e., sufficiently fast to support ongoing procedures such as surgical operations. These parallel circuits, realizable on large scale integrated circuit chips, perform surface normal calculations, linear interpolations and signal comparisons in simultaneously operating circuit paths which are asynchronously enabled when input data appear.